A big reason why we have the delusions we do: as we get rich, we each increasingly over-estimate our relative social status. … evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status. (I’m talking here about overall status in the larger community, not status relative to particular associates …) Yes, this method would work badly in environments where communities varied greatly in average levels of absolute income/wealth. …
The alien bots we will interact with will worship according to their programming. Just as humans do. What their masters think will probably never be visible to us.
Is religion about worship? I guess it's an aspect for some people, but really it's a pretty minor thing for most I think. Self reflection, humility, forgiveness, repentance, family life, and community would all be far more significant for most.
Atheists seem particularly good at picking out minor details and "proving" religion wrong due to some minor inconsistency or other.
So the obvious question is whether decline in religious attendance is all just downstream of education or not. I'm inclined to your theory that there is also a direct effect of perception of higher status but I'd love to see some empirical work that could seperate the mechanisms.
People in rich countries have very little experience with real power. Checks and balances actually work. If you haven’t experienced real power in your imminent life, it becomes a lot harder to believe in any sort of higher power.
Take the police officer. We might say he has power out on the street. But these are usually officers at lowest command rungs. They report (and obey) others, who themselves are subjected to power above them. And up and up. And even the top rank is subject the politician. And the politician is under the power of donors, media, or maybe constituents. The days of the supremely powerful mayor or governor or president are over. If a president wants to kill someone, that person is usually half way around the world, not down the hall.
Take universities. How many professors can any more afford to take even that most basic benefit of power, that of the aphrodisiac?
Take lawfirms. Take CEOs. No one seems to have any supreme power - at least not in a rich and modern country.
It is not so much that income destroys the ability to believe in the gods. It is the checks and balances on power that remove the experience of real power from daily life. The two are correlated, for money can buy a “better” more law-abiding society. Thus the lament in modern societies that no one really seems to be in control.
People want money for the control it gives them over their lives. That control over yourself is at the expense of others exercising power. Without experience of real power, the ability to believe in a supreme power is severely hampered.
When the aliens come, they won’t be subject to courts, the press, HR, or the regulatory state. They will be free to exercise power. They will seem almost unto a god. The gods fly. That’s freedom of action untethered even by the law of gravity.
Part of this has to do with the efficacy of the Gods - Western monotheisms overdid their political gambits - eg the crazy Popes of the 16-18th centuries and Henry VIII- Hinduism offers a different view of reality where we have living exemplars (not just fairy tales) and they keep religion thriving despite economic growth, social success and political manipulations (eg the Indian Republicans are in power now and popular, but religion thrives despite their lies and violence) (still early though). In the West multiple traditions are thriving and even in Catholics etc the mystical is renewed - it is just the political religions that fail, not the beautiful and loving ones
Most of what you say does seem very reasonable to me. Too many atheists, whether as an autoimmune response to most presentday religions having severe intellectual deficiencies or as a sweeping passive political desperation to insult and deny possible higher powers "that aren't helping any," don't seem to bother to actually think through the implications of naturalism and computer science in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence, combined with the cosmic inferences we can make with standard facts.
Edit: And you didn’t say anything about superintelligences demanding any sort of worship, like others seem to think, only that they would be so much more demonstrably capable that they would intrinsically command a deeply inspired curiosity and reverence.
"Some see the key dynamic here as people slowly learning over time the fact that there are no gods. But why should a nation have to get rich itself to learn this fact, if other nations around it have already learned it?"
I don't understand the skepticism here. As nations get richer their populations become more educated and more knowledgeable. Being more educated and knowledgeable gives people the mental tools to realize that religious fact claims are obvious nonsense.
To the extent we meet powerful aliens in the future they won't be very similar at all to the fictional gods we've had so far - there won't be any mystery about their existence, and presumably they'll be perfectly able to communicate with us. If they demand we worship them they might well have the power to enforce that demand, but that would just be the usual sort of tyranny.
The alien bots we will interact with will worship according to their programming. Just as humans do. What their masters think will probably never be visible to us.
"Self reflection, humility, forgiveness, repentance, family life, and community would all be far more significant for most."
And all of those are lost if you workship yourself (like we mostly do now) - as opposed to an external being, even if fictional.
Is religion about worship? I guess it's an aspect for some people, but really it's a pretty minor thing for most I think. Self reflection, humility, forgiveness, repentance, family life, and community would all be far more significant for most.
Atheists seem particularly good at picking out minor details and "proving" religion wrong due to some minor inconsistency or other.
So the obvious question is whether decline in religious attendance is all just downstream of education or not. I'm inclined to your theory that there is also a direct effect of perception of higher status but I'd love to see some empirical work that could seperate the mechanisms.
People in rich countries have very little experience with real power. Checks and balances actually work. If you haven’t experienced real power in your imminent life, it becomes a lot harder to believe in any sort of higher power.
Take the police officer. We might say he has power out on the street. But these are usually officers at lowest command rungs. They report (and obey) others, who themselves are subjected to power above them. And up and up. And even the top rank is subject the politician. And the politician is under the power of donors, media, or maybe constituents. The days of the supremely powerful mayor or governor or president are over. If a president wants to kill someone, that person is usually half way around the world, not down the hall.
Take universities. How many professors can any more afford to take even that most basic benefit of power, that of the aphrodisiac?
Take lawfirms. Take CEOs. No one seems to have any supreme power - at least not in a rich and modern country.
It is not so much that income destroys the ability to believe in the gods. It is the checks and balances on power that remove the experience of real power from daily life. The two are correlated, for money can buy a “better” more law-abiding society. Thus the lament in modern societies that no one really seems to be in control.
People want money for the control it gives them over their lives. That control over yourself is at the expense of others exercising power. Without experience of real power, the ability to believe in a supreme power is severely hampered.
When the aliens come, they won’t be subject to courts, the press, HR, or the regulatory state. They will be free to exercise power. They will seem almost unto a god. The gods fly. That’s freedom of action untethered even by the law of gravity.
Part of this has to do with the efficacy of the Gods - Western monotheisms overdid their political gambits - eg the crazy Popes of the 16-18th centuries and Henry VIII- Hinduism offers a different view of reality where we have living exemplars (not just fairy tales) and they keep religion thriving despite economic growth, social success and political manipulations (eg the Indian Republicans are in power now and popular, but religion thrives despite their lies and violence) (still early though). In the West multiple traditions are thriving and even in Catholics etc the mystical is renewed - it is just the political religions that fail, not the beautiful and loving ones
Most of what you say does seem very reasonable to me. Too many atheists, whether as an autoimmune response to most presentday religions having severe intellectual deficiencies or as a sweeping passive political desperation to insult and deny possible higher powers "that aren't helping any," don't seem to bother to actually think through the implications of naturalism and computer science in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence, combined with the cosmic inferences we can make with standard facts.
Edit: And you didn’t say anything about superintelligences demanding any sort of worship, like others seem to think, only that they would be so much more demonstrably capable that they would intrinsically command a deeply inspired curiosity and reverence.
I'd say its post-scarcity, not status madness.
I see no evidence for sentient life forms elsewhere, much less intelligent ones.
"Some see the key dynamic here as people slowly learning over time the fact that there are no gods. But why should a nation have to get rich itself to learn this fact, if other nations around it have already learned it?"
I don't understand the skepticism here. As nations get richer their populations become more educated and more knowledgeable. Being more educated and knowledgeable gives people the mental tools to realize that religious fact claims are obvious nonsense.
To the extent we meet powerful aliens in the future they won't be very similar at all to the fictional gods we've had so far - there won't be any mystery about their existence, and presumably they'll be perfectly able to communicate with us. If they demand we worship them they might well have the power to enforce that demand, but that would just be the usual sort of tyranny.
Do *actual* gods value or reward worship?
I think either our descendants will be those gods themselves, or they will die before making it to that point.