I agree with the point of “belief in religion likely evolved for a purpose so it’s not that we’re intrinsically too dumb to reject them”, but I’m not sure of the reasoning in the previous paragraph. E.g. if religion in the hunter-gatherer period wasn’t already associated with celibacy, then it’s unlikely for this particular causality to have created an evolved “sacrifice your personal sexual success in exchange for furthering the success of your relatives” strategy in the brief period of time that celibacy happened to bring status. And the plentiful sex scandals associated with various organized religions don’t give any indication of religion and celibacy being intrinsically connected; in general, being high status seems to make men more rather than less interested in sex.
A stronger argument would be that regardless of how smart intellectual processes are, they generally don’t have “maximize genetic fitness” as their goal, so the monk’s behavior isn’t caused by the intellectual processes being particularly dumb… but then again, if those processes don’t directly care about fitness, then that just gives evolution another reason to have instincts sometimes override intellectual reasoning. So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
But my point is that the process that led to them becoming monks was an instinctual process, not an intellectual one, and the “problem” isn’t actually one from the point of view of the genes.
Actually upon further thought, I disagree with Scott’s premise that this case allows for a meaningful distinction between “instinctual” and “intellectual” processes, so I guess I agree with you.
I agree with the point of “belief in religion likely evolved for a purpose so it’s not that we’re intrinsically too dumb to reject them”, but I’m not sure of the reasoning in the previous paragraph. E.g. if religion in the hunter-gatherer period wasn’t already associated with celibacy, then it’s unlikely for this particular causality to have created an evolved “sacrifice your personal sexual success in exchange for furthering the success of your relatives” strategy in the brief period of time that celibacy happened to bring status. And the plentiful sex scandals associated with various organized religions don’t give any indication of religion and celibacy being intrinsically connected; in general, being high status seems to make men more rather than less interested in sex.
A stronger argument would be that regardless of how smart intellectual processes are, they generally don’t have “maximize genetic fitness” as their goal, so the monk’s behavior isn’t caused by the intellectual processes being particularly dumb… but then again, if those processes don’t directly care about fitness, then that just gives evolution another reason to have instincts sometimes override intellectual reasoning. So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
But my point is that the process that led to them becoming monks was an instinctual process, not an intellectual one, and the “problem” isn’t actually one from the point of view of the genes.
Actually upon further thought, I disagree with Scott’s premise that this case allows for a meaningful distinction between “instinctual” and “intellectual” processes, so I guess I agree with you.