Sunday, March 02, 2008

Hyperactivity Afoot

Dr. Wilson's response posted below, raised a question that made me think of a possibly helpful answer. I'll post that here as well.

"But if there ARE these biologically based presumptions that natural events have a purpose, then they have in effect posed questions about what is behind that purpose and why. So these detection devices may now appear as costly byproducts for reasons that involve their misuse over the ages as attempts to understand our own purposes as necessarily connected to some purpose in nature. Religious mythology has so far appealed to many of us as having the best answer, but it has given us answers to the wrong questions. Because in the process we have been unaware of what there is within us that has prompted these ongoing questions and their so far unsatisfactory answers.

If we can come to understand that we already have what amounts to a built in belief that nature has a set of laws that do effectively govern us and "punish" us when we don't follow directions, and to understand what is prompting the search for a purpose behind these laws, rather than for, perhaps, the laws that serve our own human purposes, then this detection device won't turn out to have been a costly byproduct after all.It will have eventually led us to asking the right questions and the possibility of answering them through a more scientific process."

Well, I know what I was trying to say, even if you don't.

But I do need to point out that after reviewing at least some of the literature, the concept Dr. Wilson referred to as the hyperactive agent detection device postulates that we do have a bias toward suspecting such causative agents at work, supernatural or otherwise, but this concept doesn't envision the origin of such bias being from the same biologically built in "premises" (perhaps as cellular algorithms) that I have proposed exist, and would have existed since calculating mechanisms devoted to predictions sprang into life (pun intended).

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