h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wonder what it is about a religious perspective that would make the 'nonconscious' a suitable home for even part of religion?
What *kind* of religious thinking is particularly amenable to the nonconscious mind?

Thinking of JtP, his logic seemed full of quite conscious rationalisations such as "You don't understand why your 'logic' can't be applied to religion because you're a mere atheist or heathen or 'nominal' Christian." His faith seemed based on perfectly conscious and explicable propositions, albeit bigoted, arrogant and apparently contradictory ones.

Well...yes. There can be perspective shifts. Dawkins used the analogy of the Necker Cube to explain that his gene-centric view was compatible with the conventional organism-centric,,,just looked at a different way.

But I'm still not sure where religion comes in.

Remembering that I started all this by *wondering* if religion might appeal more to the nonconscious than the conscious mind, I think it might be the case that the conscious likes the clear, obvious, factual and demonstrable stuff, while the nonconscious is more at home with intuitive, speculative sort of stuff. Maybe.

Pattern-chaser

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But...let's take, as an example, part of the nonconscious mind: the thermoregulatory centre - roun the back, bear the hypothalamus, if I recall my neuroanatomy correctly. Is temperature 'clear, obvious, factual and demonstrable'? Or do we sweat for 'intuitive, speculative' reasons?

I suspect that you think there's something unusual about intuition. It's really just highly-learned pattern-matching.

Hi friends.

Fascinating discussion, as usual

P-C, you're wondering if religion might appeal more to the 'nonconscious' than the conscious leads me to speculate if just the opposite may pertain.

The conscious, which may include a 'need for certainty', may therefore find dogmatic assertions very appealing..

Maybe.

Well, 'God did it' or 'It's the work of the Devil' are fairly convenient short-cuts for a part of the mind wishing to construct some kind of an explanation for a particular event.
However, it would seem likely that those explanations may be most effective when used frequently - when there are alternative explanations for many events and processes, the supernatural ones may come to look less credible by comparison even when the event/process in question doesn't have an alternative explanation that the individual does/would understand.

Ah...but...we're leaping to conclusions about what P-C actually means by 'religion'. As noted earlier, Dan Dennett warns us not to do that.

There's a side to religion known as 'mysticism'. Here there are no clear-cut answers. Only 'what-if's' and 'that's not quite rights' and peculiar Fimbly feelings. I assume it's this side that P-C's talking about.

I venture, then, that this type of religion fails to yield any tractable 'drafts of consciousness' because it's struggling over poorly framed questions.

Unusual? No, I think 'extraordinary' is closer to the mark. But no more so than (for example) the ability to indulge in logical reasoning and/or debate.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Oh yes - intuition is certainly extraordinary. No doubt about it. Human cognition is endlessly fascinating.

However - I think the point is that intuitive/logical is a false dichotomy. They both work by the same fundamental processes. To give yet another analogy...a computer can work either as a straightforward linear processor or by fuzzy logic AI. Both methods use the same components. Both manipulate binary signals in the same way.

(I'm not saying the brain works like a computer, by the way).

The thing with 'intuition' is that it's not easy to be sure what does get taken into account. Someone might claim that intuition actually weighs up huge numbers of subtle variables, but how would they know if the process is entirely inscrutable?

The more people might laud intuition as being some great human skill, the more people might be tempted to claim intuition rather than admit (to themselves or others) to guesswork or basing a decision on somewhat baser factors. Intuition also has the advantage of being hard to explain, and so is an excellent way of drawing a veil over questions about *why* a particular course was taken, and sounds so much more authoritative than 'I don't know'.

Precisely! What we don't know, from case to case, is whether this thing called intuition is:

a) Getting to an answer based on lots of information, but without explicitly going through the steps, OR

b) Jumping to a conclusion, based on incomplete information.

Yes they do, and yet they achieve the different results we expect from them. Seeing the universe as one big homogenous blob is a valid perspective, but not necessarily the most useful.

Intuitive/logical may or may not be a "false dichotomy", but the terms describe two ways of thinking. Not the only two ways that exist. Not two ways that are so different they divide the universe. But they are sufficiently distinct that they can be differentiated one from the other. And both are powerful and useful tools.

Where are you going with this fluffy stuff, Ed?

Pattern-chaser

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>>"Intuitive/logical may or may not be a "false dichotomy", but the terms describe two ways of thinking... ...But they are sufficiently distinct that they can be differentiated one from the other."


The thing is, if you categorise intuition as inscrutable/nonconscious, you really don't know if it's another way of thinking at all, or merely thinking where we are less confident about just how the results were obtained.

If part of our mind is trying to make up a narrative to explain why a decision was taken, whether or not it was actually privy to the working-out as it happened, in a decision where it seems obvious (and defensible) why the decision was made, it may be considered in hindsight as 'logical'.
When it is less obvious why a decision was made, (or when [we suspect] the decison was made for reasons we'd rather not admit to, like giving a job to the most attractive candidate), we might label the decision in hindsight as 'intuitive'.

In practice, all decisions may happen the same way, and are merely described differently. In all but the most logical decisions, there are likely to be factors which may influence our decision, yet which don't have our attention directed at them at the time, just as in many 'intuitive' decisions, we are fully aware of many of the variables involved in the decision.

We would seem to be on rather a continuum again, with the logical/intuitive spilt being one of how we choose to categorise a decision after it has happened.

>>Where are you going with this fluffy stuff, Ed?

Wel...it was you that started it. . Where I came in, you were musing about whether religion might appeal to the nonconcsious part of the mind, as opposed to the conscious. I questioned whether such a distinction - and therefore such a question - was valid.

Now you've moved on to intuition vs (?) stepwise/linear/rationality/whatever. Again, I'm trying to poke at a) what in tarnation do you mean? and b) what has religion to do with it?

I suspect that you're attempting a mystical land grab here, suggesting that there are some questions that need to be addressed by religious-type, intuitive thinking (whatever is meant by those), rather than mere rationality. I suspect you have in the back of your mind that the prosaic atheists are missing the big picture.

(No accusations intended there: I'm just trying to work out where you are coming from. If anywhere.)

Now you're encroaching on Potholer's territory! Please, both of you, be assured that I have no hidden agenda here. I thought we were just exploring some contrasts between the general way in which the conscious and nonconscious 'minds' work.



Well yes, but it's no more at the forefront of my awareness than it usually is.

Is an intuitive approach to a problem really so mysterious? In my work, which I'm being paid for doing right now , I tend to work in an intuitive fashion. [This is a general observation. For example, I probably couldn't do my job if I adopted an *exclusively* intuitive way of working!]

Sometimes this means that I object to a particular course of action, but find it difficult (if not impossible) to justify my objections until much later, when the pitfalls become clearer. At that point, I become (consciously) aware of one/some of the concrete reasons for my lack of enthusiasm. Of course, someone who lives outside my head might just think that I'm making it up, and I couldn't prove them wrong....

Pattern-chaser

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Well...likewise I tend to be intuitive/creative in my problem-solving. On something I'm (meant to be) working on just now, I''ve been brought in as a big-picture-seer to shake up some people who would otherwise probably try to plod on down an old, familiar path. Generally I start with an intuitive solution, which I can begin to justify post hoc. The other thing I tend to be good at is making imaginative connections between different strands: 'Ah! We could use that bit here...' On the other hand - I'm CRAP at detail. And I'm not the kind of person who enjoys sticking their head in a database and leaving it there for a long time.

Yes, there are undoubtedly different styles of thinking. That might me worth looking at from a psychological viewpoint. What I doubt, though, is that there's a useful distinction between religious/mystical and atheist/rational, nor any correlation with intuitive vs linear. So far, on a limited sample of two, we seem to have unearthed one intuitive mysticist and one intuitive rationalist.


My intuition - and that's all it is; not backed up with enough knowledge - is that a lot of differences between people might be explainable by different degrees of synaptic connectivity.
.

You keep on saying this. Who is this mysticist, and what is your evidence for identifying her as such? ... And who's the rational one in here ?

Pattern-chaser

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OK.
Let's say someone is explaining a proposed course of action to me. Whilst listening to them, some internal flag pops up indicating that there's something wrong with the plan.
At some point in the future, I realise what the flaw is - some basic logistical problem that means the plan just won't work.

Conscious and unconscious reasoning would both presumably be using the same logic to come to their conclusions ('If X happens, then Y can't happen, so the plan fails'). 'Intuition' doesn't need any more (or more vague) variables to come to its conclusion. It may not necessarily even be faster than more conscious reasoning, it may just be that the conscious (ie more aware) mind may be having its attention grabbed by the ongoing communication.

A huge amount depends on the timescale of the awareness of the nature of the solution compared to the awareness that there was a solution - if it happens within a fraction of a second, or maybe within a second or two, one would consider it as conscious, if it happens rather later one might consider it intuition *even if the underlying logic is precisely the same*.
Ultimately, it would seem to come to an issue of attention and awareness, rather than a different style of thinking.

>>"Sometimes this means that I object to a particular course of action, but find it difficult (if not impossible) to justify my objections until much later, when the pitfalls become clearer. At that point, I become (consciously) aware of one/some of the concrete reasons for my lack of enthusiasm."

Obviously, *some* of the time, you might actually have objected for quite different reasons (possibly even for mistaken ones), but maybe on occasion you look back and think "*That* was why I objected to the idea!".

Excuse me if I've jumped to conclusions based on information here: U131178 and in light of previous conversations.

I'm not meaning to make a big deal of it, though. I'm just trying to point out that matters of the unconscious are yet another area to which religion doesn't add anything worthwile.

So...ticks of mental list...
Creation of the universe...nope.
Cauality...nope.
The origin of species...nope.
Human nature...nope.
Ethics...you're 'avin' a larf!

So all you're interested in is threads that display or discuss the bad points of religion, demonstrating the superiority and correctness of your chosen, er, faith?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"