Transcript May common sense and Reason prevail V

The sleep of
reason produces
monsters
Goya, Francisco
Caprichos
The rational animal – homo economicus

How far does our rationality reach?

Is it good to go too far with rationality?
Reasoning


Deduction: Wason task & its errors
Induction:




John studied accountancy at university
John works at an accountant’s office.
Therefore John is an accountant.
Social errors in experimental economics game
theories (homo economicus – building on a hedonistic human nature)


Ultimatum games
Dollar auction

Rationality overspilling
Religion
A particularly common interpretation of
irrationality by some
Sociology of religions

Five main religions:






Judaism
Christianity
Muslim
Hinduism
Buddhism
This is based on a historical account – not on
current sociological averages
Religions – how important is it?
Religions in the world
Contradictions


What is the exact definition of religion?
What is the OPPOSITE of religion?


Atheism?
Unbelief?
Atheism - The Lenin Mausoleum

Embalmed body of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
2 reasons for
embalming
Temporary
preservation
until
although
proper burial
Eva Perón
(Princes
Diana,
American
War,
Abraham Civil
Lincoln
Crusades)
Long-term
Some religions
Preserving
for
(Muslims,
Jews)
veneration
explicitly forbid
embalming
An interesting footnote


The Cathedral of Our
Lady of Kazan
Museum of the History
of Religion and Atheism

Anti-religious
propaganda
The psychology of religion
And much more
early inborn core concepts (causality, agency)
attribution and its flaws
the minimal scheme violation mechanism
Common reasons

Why be religious? Popular beliefs


Why have mascots?
Make sense of otherwise unpredictable events





Illness
Personal crisis
Adolescence – identity crisis
Luck, chance, etc..
Make sense of the world – the problem of
attribution
Causality/Intention - obsession
Gergely & Csibra

Attribution: percieved cause of action

Internal vs external attribution




Consensus – different individuals – same situation
Distinctiveness – same individual – different situation
Consistency – same individual – same situation
Interoceptive sensations of bodily action
Flaws in the system

Self-serving attributions – just world hypothesis


Avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality – religion?
Actor/observer effect (Jones and Nisbett) –
fundamental attribution error

Attention: drawing attention either to self or others shifts
attribution
Self-awareness


Why do we inevitably feel stupid after an interview
or presentation?
self-awareness – how conscious we are of our
own looks, behaviour and words



Enhances negative opinion – as a result of experiencing
oneself as the source of perception and action
Interview – people look bored – reason person/fatigue
Footnote: depression – more self-aware?
God’s authorship


Authorship in a word recognition task

Participants are told they are competing with a computer

The computer takes the word off the screen after 450, 500,
550, 600, 650, 700 ms

Participants have to make a judgement on 1-6 scale whether it
was them or the computer who took the word off the screen
Dijksterhuis, A. et al., EVects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology (2007), doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2007.01.003
17 ms prime
250 ms
premask
„me”
„computer”
„God”
„the”
„broccoli”
„xxxxx”
50 ms
postmask
Target word
Judgement
task: was it
you or the
computer?
(1 computer
6 me)
No differences in lexical decision time
me wh
o
did th
is "
4,2
"It wa
s

4
3,8
3,6
non-primed
primed
3,4
3,2
3
me
computer
GOD
nonb
GOD
believers
May common Sense and Reason
prevail
Evolutionary psychology of religion and
the reign of science
Richard Dawkins – an introduction

Primer to Dawkins



BBC programmes
The Enemies of Reason.
The Root of all Evil series

The God Delusion




Slaves to superstition


00.-30
The Virus of faith





0-1.00
6.00-7.00
13.40
29.00
0.-1.00
35.00
46.50
REASON and IRRATIONALITY
Disclaimer: my religion: Harry Potterism

Hermione Granger & the Resurrection Stone


Bertrand Russell: the Holy flying China Teapot
in Orbit around the Sun RoE 44.50



Hermione, ". 'But that's - I'm sorry, but that's
completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it
doesn't exist? .. you could claim that anything's
real if the only basis for believing in it is that
nobody's proved it doesn't exist!‘
Too small to be spotted by telescope – we are all
teapot-agnostics
Fairies, goblins, giants,
Dawkins: We’re all atheists about most of the
Gods that societies have ever believed in –
some of us just go one God further.
Disclaimer: my religion: Harry Potterism
Severus Snapism

Hermione Granger & the Resurrection Stone



Hermione, ". 'But that's - I'm sorry, but that's
completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it
doesn't exist? .. you could claim that anything's
real if the only basis for believing in it is that
nobody's proved it doesn't exist!‘
Bertrand Russell: the Holy flying China Teapot
in Orbit around the Sun RoE 44.50
 Too small to be spotted by telescope – we
are all teapot-agnostics
 Fairies, goblins, giants, Thor, Aphrodite
Dawkins: We’re all atheists about most of the
Gods that societies have ever believed in –
some of us just go one God further.
On evolution and religion
The Four Horsemen of the antiApocalypse
*The end of Faith: Harris
*The God Delusion: Dawkins
*god is not Great: Hitchens
*Breaking the Spell: Dennett
Would you like the
Churches empty?
The Bible as a literary
piece = Harry Potter
Evolutionary accounts of religion

Richard Dawkins




Openly attacking religion –
derogatory of believers
Supporter of the Brights movement
Bright – Paul Geisert’s umbrella term
Daniel C. Denett


More of a compromise
Restricts himself to the argument
that religion can and should be
studied by science
Daniel Clement Dennett

Philosopher



With an interesting history (father spy, self-education)
Darwin’s dangerous Idea
Consciousness Explained

No Cartesian theatre


bundle of semi-independent agencies
content-fixation
Denett on religion



An argument towards the scientific study of
religion – terrorist attempts 9/11
Explanation given on the basis of meme
theory (by Dawkins)
Evaluation of good and bad aspects
Denett on religion

Part I: Opening Pandora's Box



Relationship of science and religion
Part II: The Evolution of Religion
Part III: Religion Today

What should be done to stop religious
fanatics
There is reason in unreasonable behaviour
– somewhere, if you look long enough


The story of the suicidal ant and the lancet
fluke (a small worm)
There are many ideas to die for protecting
ideologies



(other animals protect food, cubs or habitat only)
The curious example of the dog (domestication)
Ideas are not intelligent themselves- why
should they cause others to kill

Neither are lancet flukes and the wings of
butterflies
What is religion for Dennett?







Religion
 Social systems
 Participants avow belief
 In supernatural agents OR
 Agents whose approval is to be sought
Elvis Presley fan club?
Need not be anthropomorphic
 Jehova exists in real-time according to some accounts
and not real-time according to others
If prayer is a symbolic activity, not addressed to anyone,
it is not part of religion - meditation
 Maybe this is the origin of religion
 Some rituals can pass to non-religious (Santa Claus or
Halloween)
Private religions – spiritual in his terms, not religious
Black magic and satanist cults
 They are not religions, because no one thinks so??
Buddhism & Confucianism (again a contradiction)
Breaking which spell?

Breaking the spell – of religion


The analogy of the men with a cell phone in the
room
Religion as a potentially evil spell – sharin
gas attack, 9/11

Other ones mentioned:





Drugs
Gambling
Alcohol
Child pornography
Addiction? – life without it is not worth living

Excessive physical or psychological dependence
(conversation? Communication?)
Breaking which spell? The fear of
knowing

Wouldn’t an extensive and invasive
examination destroy the phenomenon itself?
 Nobody knows the answer – incl.Denett
 Endangered species – often become extinct
because of capturing them to breed – which
they don’t in captivity
 Isolated people are often changed if studied
by anthropologists
 Cadavres were prohibited to study – medicine
started off, when they did
 Alfred Kinsey’s study of Human sexual
behaviour – myths dispelled – it improved sex
life

although consider „free love”
Breaking which spell?

Reformulating the category names



Gays and straights (and not glum)
Bright and … supers? (from supernatural)
Mind Philip Tetlock’s sacred values


You’re money or your life!
I’m thinking, I’m thinking!

Aside – mugging becomes lucrative..
Breaking which spell?

Religion is a natural phenomena




Not an opposition of culture
 Of course it is cultural
Not an opposition of supernatural either
It is in the nature of the homo sapiens to create
religious memes
New myths


What about a Harry Potter day?
 A new pretext to recieve presents!
 Would you be in favour of inventing it?
Santa Claus - 1985
Some questions about science

non-overlapping magisteria argument



basically the same argument as Dawkins’ – and
Gould’s
It is possible to be neutral to religion
The gap between mind sciences
(Geistwissenschaften) and nature sciences
(Naturwissenschaften) is narrowing (though
not yet disappeared) (remember SSSM
criticism)
Some questions about science

Homo sapiens – the power of the source of prediction



The causality-obsession
We can minimalize damages by preventing them – no
other species has been observed to do that (collecting
food is a general answer to periodic changes)
 Epidemics
 Economical crisis
 Hurricanes
 Can we prevent the next 9/11 by studying religion?
What if music is bad for you?
 It can’t feed anyone or cure the ill…
 All he asks for is to study religion – if it turns out to be
bad, we need to think if it turns out to be good, atheist
attacks can be silenced
Why Good things happen

Because of evolution…




Footprints of coyotes and dogs
Why do coyotes howl?
The homo sapiens sugar industry
 Tons of sugar and its counterpart – obesity clinics,
toothpaste
 Co-evolution of plant strategies to spread and
homo s. strategies to find energy source
The free-floating rationale – the unknowing,
unconscious agent
 It is perfectly rational as a mechanism, but
nobody – including the participants – is aware, not
conscious
 i.e. you don’t need to understand it for it to work
Why Good things happen

The Good Trick obsession

Anything that enhances fitness is a Good Trick



Flight and eyes were invented repeatedly over the
course of evolution
Religion takes time & energy, both valuable and
finite resources -> it must be a Good Trick ->
cui bono?
Free-floating rationale works with culture too –
that is a meme

You don’t have to understand the shape of the
boat in terms of biodynamics - it it is a tradition
(N.B. is this true for modern science ?)
Why Good things happen

The CUI BONO obsession


No free luch – somebody has to benefit
„Evolution is remarkably efficient in
sweeping pointless accidents off the
scene” – extreme adaptationism?


Remember the lancet fluke
And the toxoplasma gondii


Which lives in rats, drives them reckless, so they
get eaten by cats, which is the only place they
can reproduce
Sexual reproduction vs asexual –


making offspring more inscrutable to parasites –
actually adaptation in general
Parasites are in an arms race with hosts
Why Good things happen

The CUI BONO of religion

The sweet tooth theory



Religion is good for us – just as sugar is –
and we have developed a taste for it
And just as sugar – saccharine – it can be
cheated
The Symbiont Theories


The lancet fluke theory
Primarily it is not the Homo S that religion is
good for



Mutualists
Commensals
Parasites
Hundred trillion cells – 90%
not human cells
Why Good things happen

The CUI BONO of religion

Sexual selection


The Peacock’s tail theory
Runaway selection


Fitness indicator




Not a whim a sign of health
Faithfulness
Intelligence – music
Group selection


A whim of females?
People with religion were more altruistic in
necessary cases – better survival in rough times
The pearl theory – spandrels in a cathedral


A beautiful by-product
Does not enhance anything, it is an objet trouvé
The roots of religion

Historians „There have always been
religion”


Dennett: that only means religion is more
ancient than history writing
The CARGO cults & Melanesians –
shows the formation of new religions


The John Frum cult
The Pomio Kivung cult
The roots of religion

Formation of new religions goes at an
astounding pace



2-3 created every day
Average lifetime is less than a decade
Religions – as known today – are relatively
young historically compared to other cultural
phenomena





Christianity – cca. 2,000 years
Judaism – cca. 4,000 years
Writing – cca. 5,000 years
Agriculture – cca. 40,000
Language – cca. 35,000 - ?
The roots of religion
Psychological explanations – raisons
d’être

1.
2.
3.

To confort
To explain the unexplainable
Encourage group cohesion
Premature curiosity satisfaction (Dennett
– the hows and whys)
Pascal Boyer
1.
2.
3.
Most of relevant
machinery is not
consciously available
Religion is based on
modules that are part
of ordinary cognition
Mental Modules
combined
Pascal Boyer

What mental modules are
combined?



Hyperactive Agent Detector
Memes as supernormal
stimuli– right ratio of
irrational in the ordinary
Full Access Agent (access
to strategical information)
off-line social interaction



Divination – decision
making
Explanation
Ritualistic behaviour



Healing
Decision making
Social bonding
Theory of mind
Agency detection
Contagion avoidance
Social exchange
http://astro.temple.edu/~tshipley/mocap/dotMovie.html
http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html
•Useful if you need to find agentive
entities in a noisy background
Biological motion
• based on a few dots
• it does not work upside
down
• pattern of activity
• gender!
The roots of religion
HADD – Hyperactive Agent Detector
Device (Justin Barrett)



Signal detection theory and game theory
combined
Is this noise a tiger?
I think it is
It really is
tiger
rustling
tiger
Hit
Miss
rustling
False alarm
Correct
rejection
The roots of religion
HADD – Hyperactive Agent Detector
Device (Justin Barrett)

Better safe than sorry
Missing a signal is more expensive than a
false alarm
Animism



Children



the sun smiles at you
There are spirits in every tree
Adults??


My computer hates me…

The less predictable something is, the more
you tend to attribute intentions to it

EoR SS 33.00
The roots of religion

Practical animism – flowers and river

Rain dances – impractical animism

(at least without proper meteorological
knowledge)
Skinner, B.F.




Pigeon superstition
Random reinforcement
Elaborate dances
The roots of religion
Successful memes

Some counterintuitive ideas are more
interesting than others





Successful?





Invisible person?
Living dead?
Invisible axe with no handle?
Axe made of cheese?
Contradict only one or two biases – but in
other ways they fot the schema
Often concerned with animacy
Proto-meme – obsessional thought
Do not miss the circular argument –
again…
Pascal Boyer – Religion Explained


Concepts of the supernatural = legends, myths,
folktales, fantasy & Harry Potter!
Domain concepts (person, living thing,
artefacts)


They retain some expectations held as default true of
that domain
Yet specific features violate these default expecations
The roots of religion
Supernormal stimuli – success?

Tinbergen – the gull and the orange spot
Humans love to surround theselves with
supernormal stimuli
Music – rather pure sounds than noise





Pure vowels – melody
Pure consonants – rhythm
Pure coloured pictures - art
Bilateral symmetry




It is only characteristic when the other faces
you
Sign of health!
The roots of religion

„But the bogeyman under your bed is not yet religion”
 Non-referential names abound






Cinderella
Unicorns
Harry Potter
 – sorry! Severus Snape
Flying carpets
Pudus
You need to believe that they exist! BELIEF
 Knowledge vs belief battle - Rationality and irrationality? 4hMApoc


intertwined everywhere (lucky charms, rituals [my bag])
Contradictory knowledge and belief? [ghosts]
Hypertrophic social intelligence
Strategic information = theory of mind =
intentional stance
Homo s. obsessed with societal relationships
and other minds (remember their group size!)



Stories – learn about the intentions and beliefs
of others = gossip
A Full Access Agent?






In traditions it is often ancestral figures
Parents seem like that to children
Freud – Father Figure mythic struggles
Not necessarily omniscient – if you lost your
knife vs. You left it at the crime scene (strategic
information only)
They became omniscient later on (Boyer)
The roots of religion

Why are parents like full access
agents?

Precocial species
less prone to epigenetic effects

Altricial species

Prolonged paternal care & training – extended
information transmission

Informational superhighways

Genes

is everything needed to be coded in the genome?
Presupposed regularities



Gravity, salinity, electromagnetic wave spectrum,
composition of atmosphere
Instructional pathyway


imprinting
The roots of religion

Coevolution of cuteness – altricial species



Humans
Dinosaurs - fossils
Mickey Mouse
The roots of religion

Coevolution of honest information teaching



It is in the best interest of parents to inform and
not misinform
It is in the best interests of children to listen and
be obedient
Authority figures often have hypnotical
powers

analgesia
The pedagogical stance

Particularity of the human species




Jared Diamond – we have discovered all edible
plants (even if preparation needed) and most
medical plants
Re-invention
Emulation
Imitation – intention-based!

Makes fast-mapping, cultural advance possible

PRIMATE CULTURES
Population-specific traditions
(e.g., nut cracking, termite fishing)
Early and Fast-learning

Slow acquisition

Wide range of cultural forms

Few cultural skills

In a variety of domains

Restricted domains

Arbitrariness,
Conventionality,
Symbolism
------------

No Arbitrariness,
No Conventionality,
No Symbolism
--------------

HUMAN CULTURES

vs.
=> Cognitive ‘opacity’ of content
=> Single type of input:
 Non-communicative primary
functional use of skill
=> Cognitive ‘transparency’ of
content
=> Multiple types of input forms:
a) Non-communicative primary
functional use of skill
b) Communicative Ostensivereferential Demonstration of skill
Natural Pedagogy
(Gergely et al., 2007; Csibra & Gergely, 2006; 2009, Trends in Cogn. Sci.)

A human-specific, cue-driven cognitive adaptation of mutual design
dedicated to ensure efficient learning of relevant cultural knowledge.

Humans are predisposed to ’teach’ and ’learn’
new and relevant cultural information from each other.

Natural Pedagogy is a system of human communication that is specifically
adapted for the transmission of generic knowledge

about properties of referents that are generalizable to kinds.
The pedagogical stance

Necessary: ostensive cues


The head-lamp experiment
Reinterpretation of the A not B error
Meltzoff ’s (1988) “Head-on-Box” study
involved an ostensive-communicative cuing context
Example of fast learning and long-term retention of a
cognitively opaque (partially understood)
novel means action by 14-month-old human infants
Hands Free
Communicative
Non-communicative
Hands Occupied
Your personality

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet
you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some
personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate
for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have
not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on
the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made
the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain
amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when
hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself
as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements
without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too
frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted,
affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted,
wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather
unrealistic.
Superstition – believe me on my word

The Forer-effect (Bertram R. Forer)



Barnum effect
Personal validation fallacy – subjective validation
Horoscopes EoR SS 5.40




Positive traits
Authority
Particularity
Cold-reading (vs hot reading) EoR SS 18.15


Mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, mediums
Communicating with the dead
The roots of religion

Suppose there is a Full Access Agent – you need a
link to know what he knows

Divination!



Flip a coin –
More serious rituals







take away the responsability – and the acrimony of bad
decisions
Numerology
Astrology
Clouds
Cards
Tea leaves
Melted wax pored into water
Jaynes


exopsycic methods of decision making
The idea of randomness is relatively new
The roots of religion

Decision making and consciousness


Maybe people just need a placebo effect of
support from their ancestors – (remember what
we said about the consciousness of decision
making!)
Skeptics are spoiling the fun
The roots of religion


Health Insurance Argument
Shamans and rituals – it actually works

Ritual healing : Psychological/hypnotic effect –
usually called placebo today


Shamanic treatment is correlated with patient
hypnotizability
Childbirth! Direct connection to evolution
The roots of religion

Why are we susceptible to hypnotizing
effects at all?

Humphrey (2002) economic resource management






Body has its own cures : fever, vomiting, pain,
immune system
However this is costly
Stress reduces the possibility of these responses –
energy is needed for immediate defense against
something else
Only works if there is hope of curing
Hypnosis creates both!
Shamanic healing – ancient health insurance!
The roots of religion
Rituals – functions

Divination
Shamanistic healing
Multilexing – creating a common memory
store to preserve knowledge





The more people know sg the less likely it is
that it is forgotten – repeating all over
Evans-Pritchard – shamans typically try to
enlist people from a young age to these rituals
Cultural evolution of religion
A new perspective
Stewardship


Practitioners of folk religions do not go about
convincing each other of the existence of the spirits
– no more than we go about convincing each other
of the existence of germs, atoms, oxigens or gravity
How do you know? Best to rely on others about
knowledge



Conducting R&D is expensive
Neolithic – agricultural revolution and population boom
– no time to theorize
Separation of proto-science and proto-religion

Unable to refute


Invisible- cannot
Explicit instructions not to
Stewardship

Of sheep and men



Religion meme and its shepherds



Domestication – caused a population growth in
both species
Clear case of symbiosis
Teachers and priests keep religious and calculus
memes alive
The memes keep them alive
Dawkins’s idea on kleptocracy


the entertwining of the political and religious
Threat of an Ultimate Being
Richard Dawkins

Ethologist and evolutionary biologist





The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype
The Blind Watchmaker
Climbing Mount Improbable
The God Delusion – Root of all Evil 00.-1.00

The elephant called religion – the process of nonthinking called faith.
The God Delusion

The book was a best-seller

sold over 1,5 million copies and translated to 31
languages



„If this book works as I intend, religious readers who
open it will be atheists when they put it down. What
presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool
faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance
built up over years of childhood indoctrination using
methods that took centuries to mature (whether by
evolution or design).”
„But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people
out there:”
Conversely it raised sales of spiritual books by
50% and the sales of the Bible by 120%
(amazon.com)
The God hypothesis

Morals




would you commit murder, rape or
robbery if you knew that no God
existed?
Kant : categorical imperatives
Dawkins : altruistic genes selected
for by evolution creating natural
empathy
Strongy against the religious
indoctrination of children - EoRVoF

Should all cultural practices be
banned then?
Vive la raison, vive le science! Mors
Derrida et les monstres!

Science is wonderful


The enemies of reason SS. 41.00
The Crisis of reason 1.



Evidence vs experience (private feelings)
Ugly post-modern relativist agenda (Mors Derrida!)
Philip Tetlock: Sacred Value Protection Model


Secular and sacred values – trade-offs incommesurable
Does it make a difference between science and
religion?
Mental illnesses – irrationality
par excellence?
Darwinian models of health and illness headlong against the Panglossian idea

If we are to live in this perfectest perfect
world, why are there still illnesses around?


How come we’re still alive?
Arms race model
The bacteria arms race

Our strategy:



Their strategy:



Symptoms due to leukocyte endogene mediators
Induce fever, immune system activation
Quick death – cholera – diarrhea
Viruses: not deadly - plain cold – coughing
Self-defeating strategies


Margie profit – pregnancy nausea
In fact seems to enhance fitness – CUI BONO? for the
infant – spontaneous miscarriages becomes less frequent

If we are to live in this perfectest perfect
world, why are there still illnesses around?

Particular problem arises if we extend this
argument to mental illnesses

The anti-psychiatry movement started in the 60s –
Thomas Szasz

Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield: The Loss of Sadness:
How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive
Disorder
What is a mental illness?

Normal and abnormal




?
Deviant
Personal distress
Maladaptive/Dysfunctionality
Danger
Deviance and norm

Culture and time-bound



Norm?
Time of withdrawal after death (Indian widows and sati?)
Homosexuality?
Cultural variations

Main disorders everyhere – but with minor differences

Culture bound disorders
􀂉 Koro



􀂉 Windigo


intense craving for human flesh and fear that one will turn into a cannibal,
seen only among Algonquin Indian cultures
􀂉 Anorexia nervosa


an obsessive fear that one’s penis will withdraw into one’s abdomen, seen
only in Malaya and other regions of southern Asia.
an eating disorder characterized by intentional self-starvation, until recently
seen only in affluent Western cultures
Depression – major depressive disorder?
Chronological change


Olympe de Gauges
She was diagnosed in 1973 with an illness called
„revolutionary hysteria”




Abnormal sexuality – excessive menstruational flow
Narcissism (predilection of daily baths)
Lack of moral sense (refusal to remarry)
Mental illness as a category seems to change


Geographically
Chronologically (Michel Foucault!)
Deviance from statistical mean?
Dysfunctionality
Dysfunctionality?
Danger

True only in the rarest
of cases
Easy answer: no such thing exists…




Thomas Szasz
The myth of mental
illness
The manufacture of
madness
Theocracy –
democracy –
pharmacracy?
SCH


Thomas Szasz
"If you talk to God, you
are praying; If God talks
to you, you have
schizophrenia. If the
dead talk to you, you
are a spiritualist; If you
talk to the dead, you
are a schizophrenic."
Scientology


Birth control – death
control: suicide is a
personal right
The right to die
Are we to give up?


There is no unitary and all encompassive model for
mental illnesses
There are lots of models – as an exchange to that







Biological
Psychoanalytic
Behaviourial
Cognitive
Diathesis-stress
System-based
Evolutionary?
No model – no illness?


How are we to decide if two mental illnesses
are the same or different (N.B.: the driving
force is statistical – data gathering on
population)
1960s – a compromise is made – which is
statistics

Illness is based on correlations and clustering of
symptoms
Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders

DSM-IV (1994) - R.

More than 300 psychological disorders
described – diagnostic categories
No definition of



The cause/etiology of the illness
The correct method of curing it
Complex model – proximal level of
Environmental
description
background
Psychosocial
stressors
Disorder
Personality
Phyical health
Idiosynchratic
psychic
background
GAF –
Global
Assessment
of
functioning
Mainstream illnesses
Evolutionary accounts – distal level of
description


Some assumptions
Homo sapiens evolved 200.000 years ago –
there have been no change in brain capacity
relative to body size

So: what we experience psychologically and
emotionally was almost certainly experienced
throughout evolution
Remember the levels of selection

Individual





Reproduction
Survival
Relatives
Groups
genes…
Nesse and Williams (1994)
Pleiotrope effect
beneficial side effects – their positives outweigh the negatives and
are inseparable
e.g. sickle cell anaemia
2. Time-shift argument
Difference between EEA and today’s environment
e.g. tooth problems, breast cancer
3. Normal distribution argument
Poligenetic inheritence produces extremes in small numbers
e.g. extremely tall people, mental retardedness
1.
Nesse and Williams (1994)
4. Defect argument
the malfunctioning or lack of a mental module
e.g. limblessness, insensitivity to pain
5. Defense – self-defense
e.g. coughing or fever in case of mental illnesses
6. Frequency-dependent selection
e.g. the appearance of social cheaters is
sustainable to a certain degree
Anxiety
Cognitive models of anxiety

Maladaptive fear schema



More attentive to threatening cues
Interpretation of ambiguous situations
Automaticity of fear schemas


Explicit: not going to be fatally attacked by
daddylonglegs
Implicitly: avoidance
Anxiety disorders

Watson versus genetics
General Anxiety Disorder

How many people have you met today?
Phobic disorder


A persistent and irrational fear of an object or
situation that presents no realistic danger
As opposed to anxiety there is a specific
object to it
Arachnophobia
Arachnophobia

Some phobias are undoubtedly more
common than others



Snakes
Household items
Vehicles



Cars
Planes
Blood-injection
Go-noGo task
Has to answer quickly – otherwise it is not automatic – 1400
ms window

Spider fear



Participants had to approach a frightening-looking
spider
They had to report anxiety level
on the basis of the distance they were groupes
into high-fear group and low-fear group
Evolutionary explanation


It is not against all harmful animals (big cat phobia is
rare)
The fear seems to be directed




Difficult to perceive
Not physically, but chemically dangerous (venomous)
Yet – the bigger, the more frightening (logical with some
spiders, but the opposite with snakes)
Not without foundations – Indian statistics


925 by tigers
20,000 deaths caused by snakes
The guy also says that there are no really venomous
snakes in Australia, whereas other sources list 5 out
of the 10 most dangerous to be there (Including the
tiger snake, death adder and the taipan)

Snakes are dangerous – a misconception


Mind you- this would undermine the simple evolutionary theory
Snakes in fact are not less afraid of humans, than humans are
of them








Cobra’s hoods
Elevated stance (3/4th!)
Ability to pit
What would be the
Playing dead
point of evolving it?
Most venomous bites are not deadly
The more poisinous, the less deaths it provokes (based on mice
though)
20% of deaths is a result of trying to kill a snake
Co-evolution – they evolved to accomodate human phobia and try
not to evoke it and being beaten to death?
Source Brian Bush’s article http://members.iinet.net.au/~bush/myth.html
Depression
Depression








Impairs motivation, cognition and behaviour
Psysical and emotional energy is lessened
Motivation to achieve set goals
Concentration is limited
Personal inadequacy
Nothing seems interesting
Slowed physical movements
No heed to appearance
Depression

Unipolar and bipolar
Biological basis
Behaviourial basis

Implicit and ecplicit views

Beck: Negative schemas automtically activated




World
Self
Future
Dual process theory of depression

Behaviorial Activation system



Positive appetitive incentive
Specific to depression
Behaviorial Inhibition System




Avoidance behaviour
Associated with anxiety disorders – particularly social anxiety
Seems to be more general in psychiatric diseases - neuroticity
Depressive inhibition – it is detached from environmental cues –
has a life of its own
Evolution


The general description of depression is
difficult, because probably there is no such
unitary illness
Various evolutionary theories exist, but
generally each explains a segment or type of
depression, not the disorder in general
SADS – seasonal affective disorder

Low on behaviourial activation system to conserve resources
 Cold weather
 Vastly reduced vegetation
 Scarcer prey





Zombies – winter hybernation
Sufferers respond easily to exposure to artificial or natural light
All animals seem to become less active with cold – including
deers
Optimal temperature coincides with plant vegetation
BUT what about the Eskimo?

Bowins:The Amplification effect


Human intelligence has amplified emotional states
as a by-product – it made us the most emotional
species
Cognitive activating appraisals (basis of emotion)
are more pronounced

Intensive because conscious associations


(loose your job – scenarios of hunger and necessity)
Extension over time

The representation of past and future give rise to the
amplification of negative scenarios
Psychopathy


Hyperrationals?
The difference is only about exactly where
you store those memories

„go with your guts”
The Iowa gambling task
Preliminary galvanic skin response
OFC lesion impairs task
Preliminary galvanic skin
response
OFC lesion impairs task
Damasio’s self


Feeling of emotions depends on the
activation of the somatosensory cortices and
the insula in particular
Descartes: Je pense donc je suis.


Memory storage in the body via OMPFC
„the somatic marker” hypothesis
Simon Baron-Cohen

The female and male brain types
The other side – social constructionists



Sex might be biological – but gender is entirely
constructed
Talking about gender is like fish talking about water
Gender is one of the major ways that humans
organize their lives:




Division of labour
Allocation of scarce goods
Assigned responsability for taking care of children
Choosing people for a job : ageism and sexism exist in all
cultures
We are not animals

Rituals – animals have none




Some of these create gender – different for men
and women
Incest taboos in H.S.
Dominance hierarchies- based not on
physical power, but on other things – control
of surplus food, etc.
Mating feeding nurturing

In animals its inborn, in humans its learned
Gender transgression – construction!

Some societies have three genders



Berdache, hijra, yanith – biologically male, but
treated as women
Manly hearted women
Western society:


Transsexuals
Transvestites

Women fighting in wars
Gender bending

Homo sapiens shows very little physical
difference between the sexes






Needs identifying clothing, jewelry, hairstyles
Common gender misidentification with people in jeans
and T-shirts
Jan Morris Conundrum – easy to shift from one gender
to another
Queen Elisabeth and Saudi Arabia – an honorary man
Theater – Japanese kabuki or Shakespeare’s theatre
M Butterfly
Gender blenders

Women with short hair, jeans, no jewelry, etc.
 Sent out from ladies washrooms

Tertiary sex characteristics
 Children are taught, to walk, talk, eat and gesture according to
their biological sex
 The accidental transsexual – the case of circumcision
 Even bodies are formed




Chinese feet
Genitalia mutilations
Parents create gender entire, with their behaviour to children
The Baby X experiment – hypothetical
 People’s perception of anger or sadness of them if they cry!

Sameness taboo


Women in the military are required to wear makeup and skirts at balls
Gender differences in society



Work and wages (transsexuals)
Prestige of a job (Russian doctors)
Learned helplessness (opening doors for women)

Freudian psychoanalytic theory


The Maxist explanation


Oedipous conflict
Keep them in the dark
Szendi:

Evolutionary strategy – control over the very
scarce resource of reproduction! 
„Harry Potter is a sexist,
neo-conservative autocrat.”
Sexist

Women

The universal second race



Homogenic group compared to men (well characterized)
Some argue this is an accident and women are
portrayed positively


Rarely in power – secondary positions
// that of course depends very much on what you consider
positive
http://atheism.about.com/od/harrypotter/i/women.htm, 2008-10-04
Sexist- Heads of House



Filius Flitwick

Severus Snape
Pomona Sprout
Minerva McGonagall
1.
2.
3.
Albus Dumbledore
Severus Snape
?Minerva McGonagall?

(that only becomes clear in
later interviews)
Sexist – main characters – the Dark
Side and the Light Side









Voldemort
Amycus Carrow?
Fenrir Greyback
Lucius Malfoy
Draco Malfoy
Severus Snape
Albus Dumbledore
Harry Potter
Ron Weasley

Bellatrix Lestrange,
Alecto Carrow

Narcissa Malfoy?

Minerva McGonagall
Hermione Granger


Neo-conservative

Conservative?




I take as „adherent to traditions”
Hogwarts is the very symbol of traditions
Harry Potter – constant evasion to a
Golden age past –family reunion
FAMILY itself is central




Consider the Weasleys – the ideal family with
traditional roles
Potter family – and Auror and a ??? Housewife?
Aurors in general are men – except for N. Tonks
Consider Hogwarts as a quasi-family. /Your
house is going to be like your family here./
Autocrat

Political power in the hands of a single self-appointed
ruler



Harry Potter by the end of the series
It is rather an oligarchy, a triumvirate ruling over the fate of the
world (no cooperation with the ministry, does not tell ANYone
what he is doing, battle scene)
Autoritarian in sociopsychological sense – group leading



Only in the 7th book.
6th – rather ridiculized because on his idea on Malfoy (which in
case turns to be true), but by the end already orders people
around
1-4th Harry-Hermione division
„Harry Potter is a sexist,
neo-conservative autocrat.”
No good answer – please rely on your own
common sense.
Thank you for your attention!
This presentation would not have been possible without the ingeniously
fantasy-rich schematic work of J.K. Rowling. I thank her for the inspiration.