Should we make new people? Should we force people to remain alive?

Friday, June 22, 2012

Evolution of the Sacred Experience

Sosis and Bressler posit that religious behaviors and institutions evolve to solve coordination problems. But the advantages of religion and sacredness need not accrue to the group at the expense of the individual. Shamanic healing (induction of mental states that promote well-being by social hypnosis) exemplifies how a religious technology/institution might confer an adaptive advantage on participating individuals:
McClenon argues that hominins developed more complex rituals that produced therapeutic altered states of consciousness. He claims, citing Winkelman, that shamanic healing "was present in all regions of the world at some time in their hunting and gathering past." According to McClenon, those who were most suggestible in our evolutionary past would have benefited most from shamanic healing ceremonies, resulting in lower morbidity and mortality rates. Accepting the efficacy of shamanistic healing would have been particularly valuable to birthing mothers, and thus would have directly contributed to reproductive success. McClenon concludes that suggestibility and susceptibility to hypnosis confer adaptive advantages on those who possess these traits. [Citations omitted; bolded emphasis mine.]
In fact, childbirth customs, medicine, magic, magic to sustain life, magic to increase life, false beliefs, belief in supernatural/religion, mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances, and healing the sick (or attempting to) are each found in every human society ever studied.
The effect of this kind of social hypnosis is so strong, its incidents so immediately felt, that it was studied in an earlier era of science as "animal magnetism."
Posted by Sister Y at 11:29 AM

1 comment:

  1. Slate had a piece on doctors' resistance to tying women's tubes:

Edit profile


Edit profile


Edit profile

Edit Settings Sign out
Notify me
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
  1. @abecedarius interesting to think of stoicism, Buddhist meditation etc. as technologies for gaming the mind

  2. @SolviegM hey I emailed you back, thanks for the question!

  3. Fear of death is not love of life.

  4. @Ian_HT completely my own fault of course

  5. @Ian_HT mostly really nice - just funny to be reminded that I live in the "suicide" slot in people's brains haha

  6. Every time someone famous commits suicide I get a lot of letters.

  7. Bumper sticker: "Beauty is Fit, Read Christopher Alexander" 

  8. @madison_ponders @VinceSkolny @JesseBering (a good TL;DR being a completely worthy and helpful exercise, in my view)

  9. @madison_ponders @VinceSkolny @JesseBering Baumeister is my hero, I love the book he's TL;DRing here

  10. .@bswud @TheViewFromHell Someone should look at the g-loading of "emotional intelligence".

    Retweeted by Sister Y
  11. Crabs Are A Process: “I would love to see [an analog of Alexander’s] _A Pattern Language_ for religions” 

    Retweeted by Sister Y
  12. @bswud thanks!

  13. @realmattforney you're too real the rest of the time

  14. @AnarchoPapist @Outsideness @AuerbachKeller he's a smart guy, I bet you'd like him  insight dorks invade mass media!

  15. @Outsideness @AnarchoPapist yeah @AuerbachKeller we are all wondering this - why now that LessWrong has been in decline for years?

  16. @St_Rev I'm glad you gave me the image of as epistemic condom though

  17. @St_Rev seriously if I were treating it as evidence I wouldn't have put it in a protective condom, it's just lol

  18. @St_Rev oh murray's "coming apart" terminology - belmont v. fishtown, belmont (elite/educated white) marriages supposedly are doing great

  19. how are those belmont "marriages" going lol 

There are no more Tweets in this stream.