In a paper in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion , Louisville Seminary researchers found that children think imaginary friends know more than flesh-and-blood humans. There appears to be a rule, then, deep in our mental programming that tells us: minds without bodies know more than those with bodies. T his early, intuitive rule is much easier to follow than the tricky effort of wrapping our own limited minds around omniscient, unlimited ones.
Indeed, theologians and philosophers continue to argue over the implications of omniscience. In a article in Cognition , I reported that Christian students from the University of Connecticut who claim that God knows everything will nonetheless rate His knowledge of moral information Does God know that Sebastian robs grocery stores? This bias is especially clear under time pressure. To examine this bias, our lab asked students a host of randomised questions about what God knows and told them to answer as quickly as possible by computer.
Unbeknownst to the participants, the software we used also recorded response speed. The quicker the response, the more intuitive the question.
To assess which aspects of all-knowing agents produce this effect, we asked the same questions about a Big Brother-type government we called NewLand. And these questions about moral issues were answered more quickly than non-moral questions. The results were virtually identical to those of the sample answering questions about God. A final group of students answered questions about an omniscient alien species that never interferes in human affairs; there, no speed distinction occurred across any of the question types.
What these studies suggest is that we intuitively attach moral information to disembodied minds. And this subtle association can alter our behaviour in significant ways. In one study, in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in , the psychologist Jared Piazza of Lancaster University and colleagues told children a story about a ghostly princess living in their lab.
Though these children never heard a peep from the ghost, they cheated less on a difficult game than a control group of children who were not told the story. This suggests that gods, ghosts and other incorporeal minds might just get us to behave — particularly if we assume that the gods know about our behaviour, and especially if we think they can interfere in our affairs.
From an evolutionary perspective, the gods facilitate social bonds required for survival by raising the stakes of misconduct.
The Abrahamic God appears to be a punitive, paranoia-inducing Big Brother always watching and concerned with our crimes. Globally, belief in moralistic gods appears to be more common in complex societies. That group and another from the University of Oxford found that social complexity in general meant that belief in a moralistic god was likely to be high.
It pays to have an all-knowing, morally concerned Big Brother God in places with greater anonymity and less accountability. Gods evolve. O f course, not all gods are as moralistic as the God of Abraham. Not all gods care about how we treat each other. Not all gods know everything, not all gods beat you down for violating norms, not all gods care that you believe in them, and not all gods are thought of as human-like.
What do other gods care about? Aiwass itself is a being from the Aeon of Horus. The Aeons are a concept devised by Aleister Crowley as part of Thelema, which has the history of humanity divided into several ages or Aeons, named after Egyptian deities. It was characterized by pagan worship of the Mother and Nature. It was a time of primitive religions, before the establishment of Christianity. Christianity and other Abrahamic religions are considered by the Thelemites as being the representation of this Aeon, thought of as a time of stagnation during its spread.
In this new aeon, Thelemites believe that humanity will enter a time of self-realization and self-actualization, achieving a true awakening after the downfall of Christianity. Some Thelemites believe that the Aeon of Ma'at will eventually replace the present one.
Cultivation and herding required more labour than gathering and hunting, and that labour had to be coordinated in ways that demanded a new kind of corporatism and deference to authority. The products of agriculture, in turn, became bound, in imagination and then in law, to the particular episodes of labour that had yielded them.
This encouraged the hoarding of surpluses, undermining mutual assistance and fostering inequality. On top of all this, the diets of early food producers were less abundant in trace nutrients than those of coeval foragers and less secure in energetic terms. By adopting a diet that was less diverse, in its constituents and in the knowledge needed to acquire them, food producers put themselves at risk of a shortfall.
Agriculture was not everywhere subject to runaway feedback. We have evidence of long-term stable economies at many levels of reliance on raised foods short of total commitment.
But across Eurasia and Africa and large parts of the Americas and the Pacific, we do observe a transition to agriculture. So it had something going for it. Of course, Neolithic peoples did not decide to domesticate plants and animals. Agriculture unfolded in a mesh of gestures guided by immediate concerns — declining prey populations, a dawning realisation that it might be possible to make the rice come to the settlement rather than the other way around.
Opposing signals — the realisation that it takes more work to produce rice than to harvest it in the wild, chronic anaemia in children, entrenched inequality — appeared later. As a consequence, the selection pressure these negative effects exerted on behaviour was weaker. The downsides — infection, floods, heat islands, air pollution, the social stress, the constant light and noise, the dearth of quiet green spaces, the want of space to grow your own food at a pinch — unfold over longer horizons.
I n the case of agriculture, over time, ideologies arose to justify the new reality — deference to big men, human mastery over the land, labour equals property. Is something similar happening with cities? That is, the power laws relating city size by population to, say, number of patents issued in a given time period have exponents greater than 1 , whereas those relating population to the quantities of copper, asphalt and thermoplastic piping required to provide inhabitants with electricity, transport and running water have exponents less than 1.
Cities deliver economies of scale. In anthropology, this took the form of speculation that technical culture unfolds — unrolls? The transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next is prone to error.
To ensure the maintenance, let alone growth, of technical culture over time, you need a sufficient cadre of knowledgeable individuals to serve as models for new learners. In the treadmill metaphor, the speed of the treadmill is the rate of error accumulation; the speed of the runner, the population of the community. In isolation, a community risks falling off the treadmill, losing both existing technology and the capacity to innovate anew.
We are unable to imagine an economic system founded on something other than insatiability. Treadmill models are seductive in their simplicity, but they evince the same bias toward growth that has long afflicted economics.
Lately growth-centrism has come in for reappraisal under the sign of degrowth or steady-state economics. It is difficult to achieve redistribution in the absence of growth, since incumbents tend to view their assets, even those gained by accidents of life history, as things they are entitled to.
Growing the pie is less conflict-prone than asking people to share. That is: the problem is one not of physics or politics, but of vision. We are unable to imagine a system of economic arrangements founded on something other than insatiability.
H ow do we step off the growth treadmill before we get pulled under? Can we imagine what a steady-state world would be like, imagine the actual living arrangements — houses, relationships, meals? So perhaps an equilibrium world could not be an urban one.
First, urbanisation is an extractive phenomenon. Second, urban economies of scale are partly an artefact of how we delimit the object of enquiry — how we draw the line between city and not-city. These two phenomena work together. Newly emerging cities today bear scant resemblance to the compact metropoles of midth-century science fiction.
Urban growth is characterised by a dendritic quality, with higher-density areas — growth nuclei — linked together by transport networks surrounded by agricultural land and low-density settlement. If you have travelled in parts of the world that are urbanising rapidly, you will have observed how roads become scaffolds for ribbon cities, linear settlements that grow up to serve the needs of the road.
In the US, an absence of public policy to limit sprawl has meant that the ribbon quality persists, save that today the exemplary built form of the ribbon is the big-box store.
In many parts of the world, urban growth has been driven by informal — or, if you prefer, autonomous — construction, by and large undertaken by migrants from the countryside, with new neighbourhoods struggling for recognition from the municipal government, and the extension of amenities such as running water and sewerage.
In other places, growth has been driven by the state. The deeply indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande and its congeners have benefitted from a regulatory environment formulated to encourage urbanisation, selling not-yet-built apartments on spec, pulling in capital from state-backed lenders and enthusiastic investors, and using advance revenue from new projects to pay suppliers from the last round.
But, even in China, migrant-led growth has played a role, with autonomous expansion into the agricultural fringe leaving municipal governments struggling to impose order. Must we simply accept the loss of beloved buildings and cities to the floods and rising seas of the climate crisis? Thijs Weststeijn.
Too dense, too abstract, too suspect, Hegel was outside the Anglophone canon for a century. Why is his star rising again?
Willem deVries. Philosophy of mind. But if we can see them, can they see us? Corey S Powell. Water, salt and music form a mesmerising visualisation of sound waves. Sex and sexuality. The body is not a machine Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. Aeon is not-for-profit and free for everyone Make a donation.
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