Atheists dont commit as much crime as the Religious do

The brain is NOT like a computer. Nature is full of unplanned obstacles, and robots steered by anything like conventional computers cannot circumvent unplanned obstacles. The requirements for surviving in nature must therefore be the same as the requirements for taking a third ignored opportunity that the “poverty of the stimulus” false dichotomy ignores. The only way this has been successfully done in artificial intelligence research is by storing and processing information in a statistical way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples, as shown in “Norvig: On Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning” as well as by Watson the Jeopardy computer. This predicts that living brains do the same. Neurons can and do genetically engineer themselves on command from other neurons (References: “Aneuploid neurons are functionally active and integrated into brain circuitry” and “How many genomes do you have?”).

Computational systems are also irreducibly complex. According to computationist psychology, at least four modules are necessary to get a specific behavior done: one for identifying the specific sensory input, one for emotional motivation, one cognitive and one executive. That comes on top of general sensory and motorical modules. Such a system cannot have evolved because all those modules must first be in place for it to work at all. A connectionist brain, on the other hand, can evolve through gradual advantages by making the network of nerves more and more entangled, and simple specific functions could be carried out by reflex-type nerves before that evolution even begun.

Then there is the Poverty of the Genome. There are only 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, which cannot possibly be anywhere near enough to code for a hundred billion neurons with ten thousand connections each.

There is also empirical evidence against the claim that an illusion of free will should have evolved to motivate actions. Some cleanerfish work better if others also do the job than if they do it alone. This cannot be explained away as a species-specific quirk, because Muslims and traditional Calvinists believe in predestination (which also empirically debunks any claims of an illusion of free will being hardwired in “all normal humans” whatever that means) and yet they are as active in actions as anyone. Brain scans detecting brain activity preparing a motion before the subject claims to have made the decision are misinterpreted by computationists as “evidence” that conscious decisions should be after-rationalizations, but the only thing those experiments really prove is that signal speeds are not infinite.

Nature is full of varied obstacles. There is no way evolution could specifically program beings for them one by one. This is why robots steered by conventional computers cannot survive in nature. Thus, survival in nature requires a way to circumvent limitations inherent in all computation. The computational theory of mind is blatantly wrong.

That circumvention can be accomplished by storing information in a way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples. Robots steered either by probability-statistical computers or by networks of connections that cross each other haphazardly can circumvent variable obstacles that they are not specifically programmed for. Translation machines built on the same principles can learn to make grammatically correct translations, with no hardwired grammar at all. This disproves Noam Chomsky’s “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument (about there not being enough linguistic stimuli for children to learn each factor in the language as adults see them one by one), which is a false dichotomy anyway because it ignores the possibility of making predictions and falsifying them if they fail to pan out.

Another argument against innate grammar comes from modern research about rapid evolution. Specific traits can evolve extremely fast; even in humans (Tibetans have evolved more efficient lung and hemoglobin in just 3000 years). Even the most extreme “out of Africa” models, those that claim that all living humans had a common ancestor just a few tens of thousands of years ago, still leaves enough time that specific traits can have changed dramatically. This means that if grammar was specific and hereditary, different ethnicities would have been biologically unable to learn each other’s languages, especially since evolution would favour time-saving learning of local language by not wasting time on the potential to learn other languages if the innate grammar hypothesis was true. Combined with facts about rapid evolution, the fact that people of any ethnical background can learn foreign languages debunks the innate grammar hypothesis.

One common claim is that animals cannot speak because their larynx is not descended. That theory was based on dissections of dead animals. But MRI magnet scans of living animals show that their larynxes also descend when they vocalize (reference: “The phonetic potential of nonhuman vocal tracts: comparative cineradiographic observations of vocalizing animals”). Parrots are known for imitating words, but seals, apes, cats and elephants have also in a small number of cases learned to do some sounds that sound like words (although the elephants had to compress their trunk-tips in their mouths to do it).

Many human languages only use a small percentage of the possible sounds. Mechanically, this may be explained by the loudspeaker effect, that loudspeakers can make all possible sounds and destroying the anatomical ability to make some sounds destroys the anatomical ability to make most sounds, they cannot be removed one by one because anatomical manipulability is anatomical manipulability. It is often claimed that humans can make 10000 sounds but chimpanzees only 400. That leaves us with a difference of 9600 sounds. If humans and chimpanzees split 6 million years ago and language started evolving directly, this means 1600 new sounds per million years or one new sound every 625 years. If language started evolving no more than 2 million years ago, that gives one new sound per 208 years and 4 months. If the ability to speak was quantized, that would mean that different ethnicities would be anatomically unable to pronounce part of each other’s languages, and that is not the case. The rapid evolution argument applies to any claims of a fixed set of innate sounds in the brain and loss of those without early exposure. Poverty of the genome implies that infants do a continuous, non-quantized sound spectrum, and that all quantization into distinct phonemes is learned. Why should many phonemes have evolved specifically if they were so expendable that many of them can be disused? Do the nativists think that the earliest Homo sapiens had much more advanced language than any people today, and if so, why do they think that? Why should a more varied range of sounds have evolved for advanced language anyway? Morse code proves that a very limited range of sounds is enough for an advanced language. It may be time-inefficient, but animals also need time-efficiency in their warnings (although for a different reason, need for fast action rather than bloated information) in agreement with observations of the anatomical perquisites for speech being present in animals.

If you have tape-recorded your own voice and played it up, you know that it sounds different from how you hear your own voice. That is because sound-transfer and resonance in the skull creates distorted sounds. Parrots can form word-like sounds much better than their intelligence suggests that they should be able to according to the link between retardation and unclear speech. Birds have hollow-boned, less resonant skulls than mammals. That explains why sound-based communication is generally more evolved in birds than in mammals. Parrots have an extra advantage on top of that because they have strong shock-dampeners in both the upper and the lower beak, decreasing the amount of distorted self-hearing even more. This explains why parrots can make sounds recognizable as words. Whales have a comparable advantage underwater because sounds resonate in the water just like in the skull, so the other whales hear it equally resonated as the singing whale itself. Although (modern) human skulls are thinner than ape skulls, they are still much closer to ape skulls than to bird skulls in thickness (and more or less equal to ape skulls in density), and have no equivalent at all to parrot oral sound-dampening.

Recording and exact diagram-drawing of animal vocalization shows that they can and do create new warnings for new dangers, new sounds for new types of food, and so on. Those sounds are also learned and differ from animal “culture” to animal “culture”. One pack of chimpanzees does not understand that another chimpanzee pack’s sound for “termite mound” means “termite mound”.

It is often claimed that breathing-ways crossing eating-ways is an evolutionary random event that had no practical use until human language evolved much later (reference: “Wonderful life” by Stephen Jay Gould and “Evolving the alien” aka “What does a Martian look like?” by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart) but the fact that animals also have manipulable voices, combined with variable obstacles and practical use for cooperation, implies that the ability to transiently descend the larynx to manipulate vocalization is the reason why crossing of breathing-ways with eating-ways originally evolved (the dichotomy into “social” and “solitary” animals is just arbitrary geographical distance prejudice, so-called “solitary” animals have long-distance communication). Consider the fact that transient dislocation of the larynx is also used during swallowing to keep food out of the breathing-ways.

It has often been claimed that recursive grammar is what sets human language apart from animal communication, but animals actually do use recursion in their visual processing. Even if animals have rudimentary proto-word skills and even if they do not use recursion in communication, or that human children pronounce their first recognizable words before they talk in full sentences, that does NOT prove that the step from single words to full sentences is any more difficult than the step from no words to words. Diagnosing computer viruses is the hard bit, when that is done it is easy to destroy them (this is NOT a comparison between brains and computers, in the case of diagnosing and treating new types of computer viruses it is human programmers who do the job) and yet the diagnosing is complete before the destruction even begins. In the same way, once semantics is complete syntax is easy. Noam Chomsky’s claim that this should be disproved by the nonsensical sentence “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” being more common than a scrambled sentence with the same words ignores the fact that it does take semantic understanding (or at least some memory thereof) to know that colourless, green and furious are adjectives, sleep is a verb and idea is a noun. There is no way (for an English-speaking person at least) to say if the nonsensical sentence “pompte spununlunktra duyventuun evek pnemenyp” is more common than a scramble of the same words or not. Apes have small vocabularies rarely exceeding a thousand signs, conflate words that often occur in similar situations and do not distinguish properly between nouns and adjectives.

It has been claimed that communication referring to facts that cannot be easily verified requires trust, and that animal egoism prevents it by adding deception. But the claim that trust is required is proved wrong by the fact that criminal investigators can and do interrogate suspects that they do not trust at all. Such a detective-style language would require an intelligence that can readily spot self-contradictions, but it is a mere theoretical construction because intelligence allows spotting the relevant differences between situations which automatically creates morality (since it is just rational to cooperate in situations where you lose nothing significant on it). And the claim that animals cannot fake signals is debunked by cats making a purr-like sound deliberately to manipulate, usually begging for food (reference: BBC NEWS: “Cats “exploit” humans by purring”).

It is often claimed that “Theory of Mind” (knowing that others do not know what you know) is a specific skill required for language, but any claims of a specific skill of any kind is incompatible with spontaneous pattern emergence from examples. With spontaneous pattern emergence from examples, empathy can be explained by pattern matching of similar experiences. There is evidence of sensory peculiarities in autists. Social disability can thus be explained by the sensory difference between the child and the people around limiting the amount of similar experiences there is to base the pattern matching on. There is evidence of an overrepresentation of autism in the children of immigrants. That has often been explained by a lack of vitamin D, but it has now been shown that the risk decreases if the child is born several years after the mother immigrated (reference: British Journal of Psychiatry, 23 February 2012). It is likely that different ethnicities are adapted to seeing under different light conditions, feeling different parasites and so on. But epigenetics show that heredity can often be altered by the environment. Children born several years after the migration thus epigenetically inherit the mother’s sensory adaptation to the new environment, so they grow up in a family of people with the same senses as their own, but children born sooner after the migration adapt their senses independently of their family, causing sensory difference effects. Many studies of apes in captivity show that apes can neither educate nor imitate, while there is evidence of apes in the wild imitating, educating and even making different warning sounds depending on how much the other apes know (reference: Crockford et al., Wild Chimpanzees Inform Ignorant Group Members of Danger, Current Biology (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.053). That contrast is explained by the sensory difference between apes and humans, which renders apes in captivity autistic while apes in the wild can develop good social skills.

Based on emergent circumvent variable obstacles neurology, language acquisition works by theories about language being falsified when the predictions fail to pan out. Words recur in situations where the thing, event or quality they refer to exists. A fairly scientific mind can thus break out the specific concepts properly, while a deeply superstitious mind would keep conflating words that often occur in similar situations.

In other words, animal language is what should be expected from an extremely deeply religious brain. Analyses of epigenetic gene regulators show that humans differ from other animals primarily in the connections between brain cells. There is also evidence of some differences between religious believers and atheists in the connections between brain cells (though people who just believe in God for cultural reasons or of ignorance are like atheists in the synapses, it is those with a need for faith that have the “religious” or more properly, religion-needing synapse variety). The direct effects of drug-related brain damage are on the connections between brain cells, and religious belief is extremely common in ex-narcomans. The fact that religiosity is more, not less, common in drug-damaged brains shows that it is the religion-needing synapse variety that is dysfunctional (religious believers often lose their faith during disasters, which rules out support-seeking as an explanation for overrepresentation of religiosity in ex-narcomans). And brain scans show an extreme decrease in brain activity (sometimes to chimplike levels) during religious experiences such as prayer, meditation and religious ecstasy. During such experiences, they often start talking in tongues (glossolaly), which means uttering a lot of unarticulated sounds not even recognizable as words. The neurological similarity between apes and deeply religious glossolaly supports the theory that articulated speech is actually a side effect of scientific thought.

And since climate change has global effects (as the current global warming obviously shows, as well as paleoclimatological evidence of tropical desertification coinciding with ice ages) the language ability of isolated tribes must not mean that a common ancestor had language, because the global nature of climate change means that no matter where they lived, evolution favoured the ability to pinpoint the relevant underlying causes instead of superficial similarities between situations, in other words closer and closer approximations of scientific objectivity. And the stage between ape chattering and modern language was NOT articulated words without grammar (such a Bickertonian protolanguage has never existed) but slurred speech similar to that of retards and drunks. That slurred language coincided with minds that was very superstitious by modern standards, similar to extremely deep religious believers under normal (as opposed to ecstatic) conditions, but still closer to scientific objectivity than apes are, due to their intermediate synaptic efficiency.

It is claimed that Kanzi the Bonobo has a language comprehension equivalent of a two and a half year old child, but that figure is based on obsolete research on language comprehension in children. Modern research shows that infants understand more of language than previously thought (Reference: Francisco Lacerda). That makes it likely that children surpass apes in language comprehension before they pronounce their first true words. Phonetic studies show that ga-ga sounds made by infants gradually become more and more word-like until they become recognizable as words. The phonetic similarities between Kanzi`s sounds for different things and English words for the same things is therefore equivalent of a ga-ga stage.

Computationists usually deny that apes have even rudimentary language skills, because they falsely believe that all human languages are based on a specific set of innate rules and no consistent language rules have been observed in apes, and they often conflate words that occur in similar situations. However, there is evidence that apes still get symbols for specific objects and abstract concepts right statistically far more often than random chance could possibly account for. Apes therefore fit the connectionist prediction of what semi-symbolic language should be like.

Human infants require hundreds of examples to understand that pushing a light button turns the light on, but pigeons, domestic dogs and even some fish learn the same thing from just three or four examples. Apes are intermediate. Complex brains are more hesitative and closer to science, while simpler brains are more superstitious and make quicker assertions. Self-correcting ability, which is necessary to learn deeper explanations, slows down the learning of simpler causes and effects. But extreme hesitative self-correction at least close to science is exactly what it takes to learn language with all its words for specific objects and abstract attributes. Animals keep conflating words that often occur in similar situations because their simpler brains are quicker to assert, less hesitative and poorer at self-correction, in other words more superstitious. But there is no particular language module. Human brains, including their ability of language, are just more detailed, less conflating versions of animal brains.

It is often claimed that ”humans are good at coming up with inventions but bad at handling them wisely”, but that claim is actually incompatible with the realities of brains. Why? Robots steered by traditional computers are unable to circumvent obstacles that they are not specifically programmed for. There is, however, one category of robots that can. Their steering units are made for collecting information in a way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples. And since nature is full of a wide variety of obstacles that it would be impossible for evolution to program actively mobile animals for one by one (brains are found exclusively in actively mobile animals since only they need to circumvent variable obstacles, seasquirts even eat their own brains when they enter their non-mobile adult stage), evolution have ensured that all brains are based on spontaneous pattern emergence from examples. Spontaneous pattern emergence from examples means that specific innate modules in the brain are not needed to learn skills, which is empirically confirmed by recoveries after stroke and surgical brain hemisphere removal (reference: Mind, Brain and Education). This circumvent variable obstacles package deal is an evolutionary reason why evolutionary psychology is wrong. In other words, increased intelligence reorganizes the whole brain, so the same individual cannot be both good at inventing and bad at handling the inventions wisely.

There is also historical evidence that those who handle inventions unwisely are not the same individuals who actually invent them. Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, was a pacifist. Albert Einstein, whose theories made nukes possible, was also a pacifist. In Nazi Germany, one of the few sectors of society that was not forcibly Nazified was the industry. The reason why the Nazi German army came as far as it did was by exploiting inventions made by others, because the most prominent inventors in the Nazi German industry were not actually Nazis themselves. It is, in other words, dangerous to share inventions with fools.

Brains are networks of connections. The more detailed and efficient the connections are the closer to objective explanation the mind emergently gets, because the elimination of patterns that makes predictions that fails to pan out then has a better material to work on. Brain scans empirically show that religious experiences are due to the shutting down of much of the brain. Biochemical analyses of brains show that non-religious sceptics (or people who just believe in God for cultural reasons or of ignorance) have different synapses (connections between the brain cells) than individuals with a need for supernatural explanations have, even under normal circumstances. It is the connections between brain cells that are directly affected by drug-related brain damage. This, in combination with the fact that religious faith is extremely common in ex-narcomans, shows that it is the religion-needing synapse variety that is dysfunctional (the fact that religious believers often become non-religious during or after disasters debunks any claims that ex-narcomans should become religious because they need support). Connectionist language theory thus explains why religious experiences are associated with lack of articulated language (talking in tongues) but that is a different matter.

In situations where one can be helpful without losing anything significant on it, cooperation invariably pays because there is no reason to cheat (traditional theories about reciprocal altruism naively takes motifs for deception for granted, which is a flawed approach because in reality motifs for deception of course depends on the situation). By spontaneous pattern emergence, it takes no specific “helping instinct” to realize that, just a rational ability to tell the difference between situations with and without serious interest conflict. That you kill in self-defence or cannibalize in a situation of extreme famine does not mean that there is anything wrong in your head or that you are evil under other circumstances. Ergo, morality comes from the ability to pinpoint the relevant differences between situations, while lack of morality is due to conflation of normal situations with extreme conflict situations. The fact that fools can pick IQ points by guessing faster because they worry less for the result explains why amoral individuals can pass as smart on IQ tests even if morality is a result of intelligence.

Specific traits can, under certain circumstances, evolve extremely fast, and humans are no exception. Tibetans evolved more efficient hemoglobin and lung in the last 3000 years. Even the most extreme “out of Africa” models place the common origin of modern humans tens of thousands of years ago, and there have also been drastic local changes in lifestyle during that time. Different cultures have different moral values. If there was such a thing as innate morality, there would have been innate ethnic differences in morality. The total lack of evidence for racial differences in morality thus proves that innate morality does not exist.

Contrary to popular myths about rational psychopaths, real psychopaths actually behave in a generally irrational way (that psychopaths understand that some actions are banned but still do them does NOT disprove this, you could surely intellectually understand a society without legal exceptions for emergency situations but you would most likely kill in self-defence or cannibalize during extreme famine anyway, so-called “emotional empathy” can be explained as cognition; situation-discriminating cognition). Criminals are irrational because they do not avoid things that lead to punishment as well as often doing bad things to others for money they do not have any real use for. Company bosses are irrational because they maximize profit beyond anything they can have any use for and because hierarchy is a symptom of lack of reasoning (ad hominem arguments are logical fallacies).

Analytical reasoning is truly advanced intelligence with good pinpointing of the relevant differences between concepts. Status-based thinking requires much less intelligence, it only takes signals for strength, submission, friendship and hostility, not even articulated language. The Machiavellian hypothesis about a certain number of relationships requiring a certain amount of brainpower is debunked by the fact that intelligence increases the complexity of each individual personality, so numerical relationship count cannot possibly be any absolute measure stick. There is also empirical studies that disagree with “Dunbar’s number” (the claim that humans can maximally have 150 so-called “stable social relationships”), some placing alternative numbers close to 300. Hunter-gatherers very rarely if ever exceed 30 relationships, and since all early humans were hunter-gatherers, evolutionary psychology is unable to explain human brainpower within a Machiavellian framework. And connectionism shows that the brain is not like a computer, so linear links between brainpower and absolute number of relationships (or any other type of information) cannot be applied to brains.

Do NOT read any gender stereotypes into this description of logic. Poverty of the genome, circumvent variable obstacles package deal and rapid evolution debunks evolutionary psychology. Although high testosterone levels are usually associated with aggression, there is also something called “irritable male syndrome” which is associated with unusually low testosterone levels. Women also produce some testosterone, but it varies across the menstrual cycle, and is lowest during PMS. There are other examples of hormones sometimes having the “opposite” effect, such as oxcytocine (usually associated with close friendship and hugging) in high concentrations being associated with murder (not strictly related to the gender issue, but another example against traditional hormone classification). Since brains are dynamic self-correcting wholes and NOT collections of modules, such contradictions are to be expected. The reason why both most smart ideas and most extremely stupid actions are made by men is because men only have one X chromosome and therefore no back-up to balance extremes. The overrepresentation of men among smartheads is then explained by the fact that fools are a population majority, and the overrepresentation of men among extreme fools is because majority fools are not as dumb as extreme fools.

Religious believers are strongly statistically overrepresented as murderers and other violent criminals. Many religious believers think that you must believe in an all-knowing, punishing deity to refrain from doing evil things, which shows that religion-needers are short on non-commanded morality. Neurology shows a high degree of overlap between brain features associated with religiosity and brain features associated with psychopathy. It is often claimed that religion does not affect morality, but that is because earlier studies just asked “do you believe in God?” along with a morality test. But when the subjects were also asked about their view of God (loving or punishing) it turned out that those who believed in a punishing God were the least likely to cheat, those who believed in a loving God were the most likely to cheat, and the atheists were in between (reference: Science Daily: “Different Views of God May Influence Academic Cheating”). Many ex-criminals ended their criminal career when they became religious, even when they were extremely ruthless before. Moral deficit is, just like religiosity, very common in ex-narcomans, implying common neurological cause. This confirms the kinship between psychopathic and religion-needing brains, they are so similar they can easily transform into each other. This should not be a surprise, given that neural self-correcting logic that can pinpoint the relevant differences between situations is the basis for true ethics.

As exemplified by what the Nazis did, command-based morality can swing anyway the commander wants it to. The computationist view of conscience as a punisher is dangerously close to command-based morality. In general, order-obedient genocide executioners grew up with stringent, unforgiving rules. The reason why apes can occasionally show altruism despite their primitive brains is most likely their reconciliation behavior (they are rather cruel, but occasionally do altruistic actions). Reconciling after atrocities (with some punishment, but far from lifetime or death) instead of stigmatizing individuals as “evil” allows even rather cruel individuals to occasionally do altruistic actions, but cultures that says “individuals who are mostly cruel only play occasionally altruistic as sly machiavellism” forces individuals who cannot be nice all the time to be cruel all the time because of the “you are just pretending” assumption and similar negative reactions to all occasionally altruistic actions. The reason why all studies of apes in captivity until recently showed a total lack of empathy is probably because the captive apes were culturally infected by “good versus evil” culture brought by the zookeepers, and ape brains are too primitive to do altruistic actions in a “good versus evil” culture.

Obvious evidence for the intellectual superiority of non-religious sceptics comes from the distribution of scientific Nobel Prizes. 86% of all scientific Nobel Prize winners from the United States are non-religious sceptics. Considering that religious believers are a vast population majority in the United States, this is an extreme overrepresentation of non-religious sceptics as scientific Nobel Prize winners. And since it is possible to believe in God for purely cultural reasons and still be smart, the remaining 14% may not feel any need for faith either. Since most Nobel Prize winners get the prize many years after the discovery and are very old when they get the prize, it is possible that some have became religious because they are dying while others have mentally deteriorated due to early stages of dementia and are dumber than they were when they made the discovery.

Some studies show that religious believers tend to have near-retarded IQ, but others show that there is no difference from non-religious sceptics. Religious believers statistically solve some tasks faster than non-religious sceptics because the religious believers often do not worry for the results like the non-religious sceptics do (reference: Science Daily: Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-Believers). This allows religious believers to pick points by guessing when they do not know the answer, which means that the difference between tests with “pick one of a few alternatives” questions and tests with complete answer questions as well as how important fast answers are in the test could explain why different tests disagree on whether religious believers are as smart as non-religious sceptics or almost retarded. Even if there is no difference in formal IQ, the individuals with the faster answers must be poorer at what is not about velocity to keep the total scores equal, because velocity is an important factor in formal IQ tests.

Simple computer programs can solve advanced problems if they are programmed for them. Gorillas have scored as high as 75-95 IQ points with a note that most of their errors were in questions where the “right” answers seemed strange to them (such as beds instead of trees for sleeping) suggesting that their formal IQ should in fact be even higher than 75-95. This shows empirically that it does not take a very advanced brain to score a high formal IQ. Human children require hundreds of examples to figure out simple cause-effect relationships such as a button lighting a light bulb, but pigeons, domestic dogs and even some fish can learn such things from three or four examples. Connectionist theory actually predicts that complex brains hesitate while simple brains make quick assertions. This shows that the religion-needing intellectual profile really is more animalistic than the sceptic intellectual profile.

To use a tool that has already been made or to learn a manufacturing process that has already been thought out does not require anywhere near as good ability to recombine information as figuring out the theories behind from scratch does. Sharing technology with those who are too stupid to figure it out on their own is like giving matches to small children or guns to chimpanzees. The result is the same: technology in the hands of individuals unable to handle it wisely.

There are many religious artists, authors and musicians, but claims of a specific symbolic module in the brain does not hold up for the circumvent variable obstacles package deal either. Such specific skills are far more likely due to sensory differences outside the brain itself. Differences in the brain can be explained by sensory input reshaping the brain. Brains are lumps where it is easy to form new connections, making them too plastic to house fixed skills, while nerves outside the brain goes separately enough to be hardwired. This is confirmed by differences in the retina between dyslectics and others (reference: Mind, Brain and Education). Another fact is that paintings made by chimpanzees and elephants have been rated as very good by critics. Art does not even require the same, or even anywhere near (!) the same non-conflating intellect as language does. But the part of artistic skills that covariate with scientific skill is in the brain, consider that apes and elephants just doodle when they get the chance and time to paint (although some art critics have called it “fine abstract non-figurative art”). Today, African hunter-gatherers generally only need to “work” about 3 hours per day, while some Native American tribes in the more hostile climates in America must hunt and gather 12 hours per day to survive, despite functionally equal technology. Those Native American tribes make much less art, and what art they do is visibly affected by lack of time, compared to African hunter-gatherers. Poorer technology in the distant past explains why there is no art from the lower Paleolithic, and environmental factors explain why the necessary leisure was first achieved in Africa.

It is often claimed that Einstein was religious, but in fact he did not believe in a personal God, he just used the word “God” as a metaphor for the laws of physics, so only an insanely fanatic word-splitter can call Einstein religious. Apart from smartheads who just use the word “God” as a metaphor for the laws of nature, it is also possible to believe in a personal God for cultural reasons (at least until long as hard scientific evidence that there is no way God can possibly exist appears, which it may or may not at some point in the future), because of ignorance, or because one is dying, and still be smart. It is the individuals with a need for supernatural explanations that are stupid. Retards in general make up simplified explanations quickly and rarely if ever doubt them, and are worried or get angry if others say that they are wrong.

To stop the dumb actions that are going on in the world, smart people should stop sharing technology with unreasonable fools. If you have smart ideas, only share them with other reasonable smart people who can also handle them wisely, and of course explain to them why it is dangerous to share technology with unreasonable fools. Do NOT share technology with them as long as they deny the danger of sharing technology with fools or believe in modulist brain theories (modulist brain theories are incompatible with the warning about the danger of sharing technology with fools), because smartheads who are ignorant of the danger of sharing technology with fools may spread inventions to fools. And of course it is important to spread this warning to all smartheads.

The fact that mainstream psychologists deny the existence of rational decision-making proves that the fools must (currently) be a population majority. There must, however, exist individuals who make rational decisions anyway, because there are no way beings as irrational as mainstream psychologists think humans are could have created modern science and technology on their own. The emergent nature of consciousness debunks any claims that all humans should be psychologically near-identical just because of their genetic near-identity. Cultural “universals” does NOT prove computational instinct (also consider the rapid evolution argument) but can be explained by practical need and some degree of insight, and differing motivations for similar behavior does NOT prove after-construct but can instead be explained by the theoretical approximation built from its clues and not separate from them that science and proto-science always develops along.

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April 22, 2012 at 3:01 pm

2 thoughts on “Atheists dont commit as much crime as the Religious do”

Martin J Sallberg says:

The brain is NOT like a computer. Nature is full of unplanned obstacles, and robots steered by anything like conventional computers cannot circumvent unplanned obstacles. The requirements for surviving in nature must therefore be the same as the requirements for taking a third ignored opportunity that the “poverty of the stimulus” false dichotomy ignores. The only way this has been successfully done in artificial intelligence research is by storing and processing information in a statistical way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples, as shown in “Norvig: On Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning” as well as by Watson the Jeopardy computer. This predicts that living brains do the same. Neurons can and do genetically engineer themselves on command from other neurons (References: “Aneuploid neurons are functionally active and integrated into brain circuitry” and “How many genomes do you have?”).

Computational systems are also irreducibly complex. According to computationist psychology, at least four modules are necessary to get a specific behavior done: one for identifying the specific sensory input, one for emotional motivation, one cognitive and one executive. That comes on top of general sensory and motorical modules. Such a system cannot have evolved because all those modules must first be in place for it to work at all. A connectionist brain, on the other hand, can evolve through gradual advantages by making the network of nerves more and more entangled, and simple specific functions could be carried out by reflex-type nerves before that evolution even begun.

Then there is the Poverty of the Genome. There are only 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, which cannot possibly be anywhere near enough to code for a hundred billion neurons with ten thousand connections each.

There is also empirical evidence against the claim that an illusion of free will should have evolved to motivate actions. Some cleanerfish work better if others also do the job than if they do it alone. This cannot be explained away as a species-specific quirk, because Muslims and traditional Calvinists believe in predestination (which also empirically debunks any claims of an illusion of free will being hardwired in “all normal humans” whatever that means) and yet they are as active in actions as anyone. Brain scans detecting brain activity preparing a motion before the subject claims to have made the decision are misinterpreted by computationists as “evidence” that conscious decisions should be after-rationalizations, but the only thing those experiments really prove is that signal speeds are not infinite.

Nature is full of varied obstacles. There is no way evolution could specifically program beings for them one by one. This is why robots steered by conventional computers cannot survive in nature. Thus, survival in nature requires a way to circumvent limitations inherent in all computation. The computational theory of mind is blatantly wrong.

That circumvention can be accomplished by storing information in a way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples. Robots steered either by probability-statistical computers or by networks of connections that cross each other haphazardly can circumvent variable obstacles that they are not specifically programmed for. Translation machines built on the same principles can learn to make grammatically correct translations, with no hardwired grammar at all. This disproves Noam Chomsky’s “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument (about there not being enough linguistic stimuli for children to learn each factor in the language as adults see them one by one), which is a false dichotomy anyway because it ignores the possibility of making predictions and falsifying them if they fail to pan out.

Another argument against innate grammar comes from modern research about rapid evolution. Specific traits can evolve extremely fast; even in humans (Tibetans have evolved more efficient lung and hemoglobin in just 3000 years). Even the most extreme “out of Africa” models, those that claim that all living humans had a common ancestor just a few tens of thousands of years ago, still leaves enough time that specific traits can have changed dramatically. This means that if grammar was specific and hereditary, different ethnicities would have been biologically unable to learn each other’s languages, especially since evolution would favour time-saving learning of local language by not wasting time on the potential to learn other languages if the innate grammar hypothesis was true. Combined with facts about rapid evolution, the fact that people of any ethnical background can learn foreign languages debunks the innate grammar hypothesis.

One common claim is that animals cannot speak because their larynx is not descended. That theory was based on dissections of dead animals. But MRI magnet scans of living animals show that their larynxes also descend when they vocalize (reference: “The phonetic potential of nonhuman vocal tracts: comparative cineradiographic observations of vocalizing animals”). Parrots are known for imitating words, but seals, apes, cats and elephants have also in a small number of cases learned to do some sounds that sound like words (although the elephants had to compress their trunk-tips in their mouths to do it).

Many human languages only use a small percentage of the possible sounds. Mechanically, this may be explained by the loudspeaker effect, that loudspeakers can make all possible sounds and destroying the anatomical ability to make some sounds destroys the anatomical ability to make most sounds, they cannot be removed one by one because anatomical manipulability is anatomical manipulability. It is often claimed that humans can make 10000 sounds but chimpanzees only 400. That leaves us with a difference of 9600 sounds. If humans and chimpanzees split 6 million years ago and language started evolving directly, this means 1600 new sounds per million years or one new sound every 625 years. If language started evolving no more than 2 million years ago, that gives one new sound per 208 years and 4 months. If the ability to speak was quantized, that would mean that different ethnicities would be anatomically unable to pronounce part of each other’s languages, and that is not the case. The rapid evolution argument applies to any claims of a fixed set of innate sounds in the brain and loss of those without early exposure. Poverty of the genome implies that infants do a continuous, non-quantized sound spectrum, and that all quantization into distinct phonemes is learned. Why should many phonemes have evolved specifically if they were so expendable that many of them can be disused? Do the nativists think that the earliest Homo sapiens had much more advanced language than any people today, and if so, why do they think that? Why should a more varied range of sounds have evolved for advanced language anyway? Morse code proves that a very limited range of sounds is enough for an advanced language. It may be time-inefficient, but animals also need time-efficiency in their warnings (although for a different reason, need for fast action rather than bloated information) in agreement with observations of the anatomical perquisites for speech being present in animals.

If you have tape-recorded your own voice and played it up, you know that it sounds different from how you hear your own voice. That is because sound-transfer and resonance in the skull creates distorted sounds. Parrots can form word-like sounds much better than their intelligence suggests that they should be able to according to the link between retardation and unclear speech. Birds have hollow-boned, less resonant skulls than mammals. That explains why sound-based communication is generally more evolved in birds than in mammals. Parrots have an extra advantage on top of that because they have strong shock-dampeners in both the upper and the lower beak, decreasing the amount of distorted self-hearing even more. This explains why parrots can make sounds recognizable as words. Whales have a comparable advantage underwater because sounds resonate in the water just like in the skull, so the other whales hear it equally resonated as the singing whale itself. Although (modern) human skulls are thinner than ape skulls, they are still much closer to ape skulls than to bird skulls in thickness (and more or less equal to ape skulls in density), and have no equivalent at all to parrot oral sound-dampening.

Recording and exact diagram-drawing of animal vocalization shows that they can and do create new warnings for new dangers, new sounds for new types of food, and so on. Those sounds are also learned and differ from animal “culture” to animal “culture”. One pack of chimpanzees does not understand that another chimpanzee pack’s sound for “termite mound” means “termite mound”.

It is often claimed that breathing-ways crossing eating-ways is an evolutionary random event that had no practical use until human language evolved much later (reference: “Wonderful life” by Stephen Jay Gould and “Evolving the alien” aka “What does a Martian look like?” by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart) but the fact that animals also have manipulable voices, combined with variable obstacles and practical use for cooperation, implies that the ability to transiently descend the larynx to manipulate vocalization is the reason why crossing of breathing-ways with eating-ways originally evolved (the dichotomy into “social” and “solitary” animals is just arbitrary geographical distance prejudice, so-called “solitary” animals have long-distance communication). Consider the fact that transient dislocation of the larynx is also used during swallowing to keep food out of the breathing-ways.

It has often been claimed that recursive grammar is what sets human language apart from animal communication, but animals actually do use recursion in their visual processing. Even if animals have rudimentary proto-word skills and even if they do not use recursion in communication, or that human children pronounce their first recognizable words before they talk in full sentences, that does NOT prove that the step from single words to full sentences is any more difficult than the step from no words to words. Diagnosing computer viruses is the hard bit, when that is done it is easy to destroy them (this is NOT a comparison between brains and computers, in the case of diagnosing and treating new types of computer viruses it is human programmers who do the job) and yet the diagnosing is complete before the destruction even begins. In the same way, once semantics is complete syntax is easy. Noam Chomsky’s claim that this should be disproved by the nonsensical sentence “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” being more common than a scrambled sentence with the same words ignores the fact that it does take semantic understanding (or at least some memory thereof) to know that colourless, green and furious are adjectives, sleep is a verb and idea is a noun. There is no way (for an English-speaking person at least) to say if the nonsensical sentence “pompte spununlunktra duyventuun evek pnemenyp” is more common than a scramble of the same words or not. Apes have small vocabularies rarely exceeding a thousand signs, conflate words that often occur in similar situations and do not distinguish properly between nouns and adjectives.

It has been claimed that communication referring to facts that cannot be easily verified requires trust, and that animal egoism prevents it by adding deception. But the claim that trust is required is proved wrong by the fact that criminal investigators can and do interrogate suspects that they do not trust at all. Such a detective-style language would require an intelligence that can readily spot self-contradictions, but it is a mere theoretical construction because intelligence allows spotting the relevant differences between situations which automatically creates morality (since it is just rational to cooperate in situations where you lose nothing significant on it). And the claim that animals cannot fake signals is debunked by cats making a purr-like sound deliberately to manipulate, usually begging for food (reference: BBC NEWS: “Cats “exploit” humans by purring”).

It is often claimed that “Theory of Mind” (knowing that others do not know what you know) is a specific skill required for language, but any claims of a specific skill of any kind is incompatible with spontaneous pattern emergence from examples. With spontaneous pattern emergence from examples, empathy can be explained by pattern matching of similar experiences. There is evidence of sensory peculiarities in autists. Social disability can thus be explained by the sensory difference between the child and the people around limiting the amount of similar experiences there is to base the pattern matching on. There is evidence of an overrepresentation of autism in the children of immigrants. That has often been explained by a lack of vitamin D, but it has now been shown that the risk decreases if the child is born several years after the mother immigrated (reference: British Journal of Psychiatry, 23 February 2012). It is likely that different ethnicities are adapted to seeing under different light conditions, feeling different parasites and so on. But epigenetics show that heredity can often be altered by the environment. Children born several years after the migration thus epigenetically inherit the mother’s sensory adaptation to the new environment, so they grow up in a family of people with the same senses as their own, but children born sooner after the migration adapt their senses independently of their family, causing sensory difference effects. Many studies of apes in captivity show that apes can neither educate nor imitate, while there is evidence of apes in the wild imitating, educating and even making different warning sounds depending on how much the other apes know (reference: Crockford et al., Wild Chimpanzees Inform Ignorant Group Members of Danger, Current Biology (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.053). That contrast is explained by the sensory difference between apes and humans, which renders apes in captivity autistic while apes in the wild can develop good social skills.

Based on emergent circumvent variable obstacles neurology, language acquisition works by theories about language being falsified when the predictions fail to pan out. Words recur in situations where the thing, event or quality they refer to exists. A fairly scientific mind can thus break out the specific concepts properly, while a deeply superstitious mind would keep conflating words that often occur in similar situations.

In other words, animal language is what should be expected from an extremely deeply religious brain. Analyses of epigenetic gene regulators show that humans differ from other animals primarily in the connections between brain cells. There is also evidence of some differences between religious believers and atheists in the connections between brain cells (though people who just believe in God for cultural reasons or of ignorance are like atheists in the synapses, it is those with a need for faith that have the “religious” or more properly, religion-needing synapse variety). The direct effects of drug-related brain damage are on the connections between brain cells, and religious belief is extremely common in ex-narcomans. The fact that religiosity is more, not less, common in drug-damaged brains shows that it is the religion-needing synapse variety that is dysfunctional (religious believers often lose their faith during disasters, which rules out support-seeking as an explanation for overrepresentation of religiosity in ex-narcomans). And brain scans show an extreme decrease in brain activity (sometimes to chimplike levels) during religious experiences such as prayer, meditation and religious ecstasy. During such experiences, they often start talking in tongues (glossolaly), which means uttering a lot of unarticulated sounds not even recognizable as words. The neurological similarity between apes and deeply religious glossolaly supports the theory that articulated speech is actually a side effect of scientific thought.

And since climate change has global effects (as the current global warming obviously shows, as well as paleoclimatological evidence of tropical desertification coinciding with ice ages) the language ability of isolated tribes must not mean that a common ancestor had language, because the global nature of climate change means that no matter where they lived, evolution favoured the ability to pinpoint the relevant underlying causes instead of superficial similarities between situations, in other words closer and closer approximations of scientific objectivity. And the stage between ape chattering and modern language was NOT articulated words without grammar (such a Bickertonian protolanguage has never existed) but slurred speech similar to that of retards and drunks. That slurred language coincided with minds that was very superstitious by modern standards, similar to extremely deep religious believers under normal (as opposed to ecstatic) conditions, but still closer to scientific objectivity than apes are, due to their intermediate synaptic efficiency.

It is claimed that Kanzi the Bonobo has a language comprehension equivalent of a two and a half year old child, but that figure is based on obsolete research on language comprehension in children. Modern research shows that infants understand more of language than previously thought (Reference: Francisco Lacerda). That makes it likely that children surpass apes in language comprehension before they pronounce their first true words. Phonetic studies show that ga-ga sounds made by infants gradually become more and more word-like until they become recognizable as words. The phonetic similarities between Kanzi`s sounds for different things and English words for the same things is therefore equivalent of a ga-ga stage.

Computationists usually deny that apes have even rudimentary language skills, because they falsely believe that all human languages are based on a specific set of innate rules and no consistent language rules have been observed in apes, and they often conflate words that occur in similar situations. However, there is evidence that apes still get symbols for specific objects and abstract concepts right statistically far more often than random chance could possibly account for. Apes therefore fit the connectionist prediction of what semi-symbolic language should be like.

Human infants require hundreds of examples to understand that pushing a light button turns the light on, but pigeons, domestic dogs and even some fish learn the same thing from just three or four examples. Apes are intermediate. Complex brains are more hesitative and closer to science, while simpler brains are more superstitious and make quicker assertions. Self-correcting ability, which is necessary to learn deeper explanations, slows down the learning of simpler causes and effects. But extreme hesitative self-correction at least close to science is exactly what it takes to learn language with all its words for specific objects and abstract attributes. Animals keep conflating words that often occur in similar situations because their simpler brains are quicker to assert, less hesitative and poorer at self-correction, in other words more superstitious. But there is no particular language module. Human brains, including their ability of language, are just more detailed, less conflating versions of animal brains.

It is often claimed that ”humans are good at coming up with inventions but bad at handling them wisely”, but that claim is actually incompatible with the realities of brains. Why? Robots steered by traditional computers are unable to circumvent obstacles that they are not specifically programmed for. There is, however, one category of robots that can. Their steering units are made for collecting information in a way that allows patterns to emerge spontaneously from examples. And since nature is full of a wide variety of obstacles that it would be impossible for evolution to program actively mobile animals for one by one (brains are found exclusively in actively mobile animals since only they need to circumvent variable obstacles, seasquirts even eat their own brains when they enter their non-mobile adult stage), evolution have ensured that all brains are based on spontaneous pattern emergence from examples. Spontaneous pattern emergence from examples means that specific innate modules in the brain are not needed to learn skills, which is empirically confirmed by recoveries after stroke and surgical brain hemisphere removal (reference: Mind, Brain and Education). This circumvent variable obstacles package deal is an evolutionary reason why evolutionary psychology is wrong. In other words, increased intelligence reorganizes the whole brain, so the same individual cannot be both good at inventing and bad at handling the inventions wisely.

There is also historical evidence that those who handle inventions unwisely are not the same individuals who actually invent them. Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, was a pacifist. Albert Einstein, whose theories made nukes possible, was also a pacifist. In Nazi Germany, one of the few sectors of society that was not forcibly Nazified was the industry. The reason why the Nazi German army came as far as it did was by exploiting inventions made by others, because the most prominent inventors in the Nazi German industry were not actually Nazis themselves. It is, in other words, dangerous to share inventions with fools.

Brains are networks of connections. The more detailed and efficient the connections are the closer to objective explanation the mind emergently gets, because the elimination of patterns that makes predictions that fails to pan out then has a better material to work on. Brain scans empirically show that religious experiences are due to the shutting down of much of the brain. Biochemical analyses of brains show that non-religious sceptics (or people who just believe in God for cultural reasons or of ignorance) have different synapses (connections between the brain cells) than individuals with a need for supernatural explanations have, even under normal circumstances. It is the connections between brain cells that are directly affected by drug-related brain damage. This, in combination with the fact that religious faith is extremely common in ex-narcomans, shows that it is the religion-needing synapse variety that is dysfunctional (the fact that religious believers often become non-religious during or after disasters debunks any claims that ex-narcomans should become religious because they need support). Connectionist language theory thus explains why religious experiences are associated with lack of articulated language (talking in tongues) but that is a different matter.

In situations where one can be helpful without losing anything significant on it, cooperation invariably pays because there is no reason to cheat (traditional theories about reciprocal altruism naively takes motifs for deception for granted, which is a flawed approach because in reality motifs for deception of course depends on the situation). By spontaneous pattern emergence, it takes no specific “helping instinct” to realize that, just a rational ability to tell the difference between situations with and without serious interest conflict. That you kill in self-defence or cannibalize in a situation of extreme famine does not mean that there is anything wrong in your head or that you are evil under other circumstances. Ergo, morality comes from the ability to pinpoint the relevant differences between situations, while lack of morality is due to conflation of normal situations with extreme conflict situations. The fact that fools can pick IQ points by guessing faster because they worry less for the result explains why amoral individuals can pass as smart on IQ tests even if morality is a result of intelligence.

Specific traits can, under certain circumstances, evolve extremely fast, and humans are no exception. Tibetans evolved more efficient hemoglobin and lung in the last 3000 years. Even the most extreme “out of Africa” models place the common origin of modern humans tens of thousands of years ago, and there have also been drastic local changes in lifestyle during that time. Different cultures have different moral values. If there was such a thing as innate morality, there would have been innate ethnic differences in morality. The total lack of evidence for racial differences in morality thus proves that innate morality does not exist.

Contrary to popular myths about rational psychopaths, real psychopaths actually behave in a generally irrational way (that psychopaths understand that some actions are banned but still do them does NOT disprove this, you could surely intellectually understand a society without legal exceptions for emergency situations but you would most likely kill in self-defence or cannibalize during extreme famine anyway, so-called “emotional empathy” can be explained as cognition; situation-discriminating cognition). Criminals are irrational because they do not avoid things that lead to punishment as well as often doing bad things to others for money they do not have any real use for. Company bosses are irrational because they maximize profit beyond anything they can have any use for and because hierarchy is a symptom of lack of reasoning (ad hominem arguments are logical fallacies).

Analytical reasoning is truly advanced intelligence with good pinpointing of the relevant differences between concepts. Status-based thinking requires much less intelligence, it only takes signals for strength, submission, friendship and hostility, not even articulated language. The Machiavellian hypothesis about a certain number of relationships requiring a certain amount of brainpower is debunked by the fact that intelligence increases the complexity of each individual personality, so numerical relationship count cannot possibly be any absolute measure stick. There is also empirical studies that disagree with “Dunbar’s number” (the claim that humans can maximally have 150 so-called “stable social relationships”), some placing alternative numbers close to 300. Hunter-gatherers very rarely if ever exceed 30 relationships, and since all early humans were hunter-gatherers, evolutionary psychology is unable to explain human brainpower within a Machiavellian framework. And connectionism shows that the brain is not like a computer, so linear links between brainpower and absolute number of relationships (or any other type of information) cannot be applied to brains.

Do NOT read any gender stereotypes into this description of logic. Poverty of the genome, circumvent variable obstacles package deal and rapid evolution debunks evolutionary psychology. Although high testosterone levels are usually associated with aggression, there is also something called “irritable male syndrome” which is associated with unusually low testosterone levels. Women also produce some testosterone, but it varies across the menstrual cycle, and is lowest during PMS. There are other examples of hormones sometimes having the “opposite” effect, such as oxcytocine (usually associated with close friendship and hugging) in high concentrations being associated with murder (not strictly related to the gender issue, but another example against traditional hormone classification). Since brains are dynamic self-correcting wholes and NOT collections of modules, such contradictions are to be expected. The reason why both most smart ideas and most extremely stupid actions are made by men is because men only have one X chromosome and therefore no back-up to balance extremes. The overrepresentation of men among smartheads is then explained by the fact that fools are a population majority, and the overrepresentation of men among extreme fools is because majority fools are not as dumb as extreme fools.

Religious believers are strongly statistically overrepresented as murderers and other violent criminals. Many religious believers think that you must believe in an all-knowing, punishing deity to refrain from doing evil things, which shows that religion-needers are short on non-commanded morality. Neurology shows a high degree of overlap between brain features associated with religiosity and brain features associated with psychopathy. It is often claimed that religion does not affect morality, but that is because earlier studies just asked “do you believe in God?” along with a morality test. But when the subjects were also asked about their view of God (loving or punishing) it turned out that those who believed in a punishing God were the least likely to cheat, those who believed in a loving God were the most likely to cheat, and the atheists were in between (reference: Science Daily: “Different Views of God May Influence Academic Cheating”). Many ex-criminals ended their criminal career when they became religious, even when they were extremely ruthless before. Moral deficit is, just like religiosity, very common in ex-narcomans, implying common neurological cause. This confirms the kinship between psychopathic and religion-needing brains, they are so similar they can easily transform into each other. This should not be a surprise, given that neural self-correcting logic that can pinpoint the relevant differences between situations is the basis for true ethics.

As exemplified by what the Nazis did, command-based morality can swing anyway the commander wants it to. The computationist view of conscience as a punisher is dangerously close to command-based morality. In general, order-obedient genocide executioners grew up with stringent, unforgiving rules. The reason why apes can occasionally show altruism despite their primitive brains is most likely their reconciliation behavior (they are rather cruel, but occasionally do altruistic actions). Reconciling after atrocities (with some punishment, but far from lifetime or death) instead of stigmatizing individuals as “evil” allows even rather cruel individuals to occasionally do altruistic actions, but cultures that says “individuals who are mostly cruel only play occasionally altruistic as sly machiavellism” forces individuals who cannot be nice all the time to be cruel all the time because of the “you are just pretending” assumption and similar negative reactions to all occasionally altruistic actions. The reason why all studies of apes in captivity until recently showed a total lack of empathy is probably because the captive apes were culturally infected by “good versus evil” culture brought by the zookeepers, and ape brains are too primitive to do altruistic actions in a “good versus evil” culture.

Obvious evidence for the intellectual superiority of non-religious sceptics comes from the distribution of scientific Nobel Prizes. 86% of all scientific Nobel Prize winners from the United States are non-religious sceptics. Considering that religious believers are a vast population majority in the United States, this is an extreme overrepresentation of non-religious sceptics as scientific Nobel Prize winners. And since it is possible to believe in God for purely cultural reasons and still be smart, the remaining 14% may not feel any need for faith either. Since most Nobel Prize winners get the prize many years after the discovery and are very old when they get the prize, it is possible that some have became religious because they are dying while others have mentally deteriorated due to early stages of dementia and are dumber than they were when they made the discovery.

Some studies show that religious believers tend to have near-retarded IQ, but others show that there is no difference from non-religious sceptics. Religious believers statistically solve some tasks faster than non-religious sceptics because the religious believers often do not worry for the results like the non-religious sceptics do (reference: Science Daily: Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-Believers). This allows religious believers to pick points by guessing when they do not know the answer, which means that the difference between tests with “pick one of a few alternatives” questions and tests with complete answer questions as well as how important fast answers are in the test could explain why different tests disagree on whether religious believers are as smart as non-religious sceptics or almost retarded. Even if there is no difference in formal IQ, the individuals with the faster answers must be poorer at what is not about velocity to keep the total scores equal, because velocity is an important factor in formal IQ tests.

Simple computer programs can solve advanced problems if they are programmed for them. Gorillas have scored as high as 75-95 IQ points with a note that most of their errors were in questions where the “right” answers seemed strange to them (such as beds instead of trees for sleeping) suggesting that their formal IQ should in fact be even higher than 75-95. This shows empirically that it does not take a very advanced brain to score a high formal IQ. Human children require hundreds of examples to figure out simple cause-effect relationships such as a button lighting a light bulb, but pigeons, domestic dogs and even some fish can learn such things from three or four examples. Connectionist theory actually predicts that complex brains hesitate while simple brains make quick assertions. This shows that the religion-needing intellectual profile really is more animalistic than the sceptic intellectual profile.

To use a tool that has already been made or to learn a manufacturing process that has already been thought out does not require anywhere near as good ability to recombine information as figuring out the theories behind from scratch does. Sharing technology with those who are too stupid to figure it out on their own is like giving matches to small children or guns to chimpanzees. The result is the same: technology in the hands of individuals unable to handle it wisely.

There are many religious artists, authors and musicians, but claims of a specific symbolic module in the brain does not hold up for the circumvent variable obstacles package deal either. Such specific skills are far more likely due to sensory differences outside the brain itself. Differences in the brain can be explained by sensory input reshaping the brain. Brains are lumps where it is easy to form new connections, making them too plastic to house fixed skills, while nerves outside the brain goes separately enough to be hardwired. This is confirmed by differences in the retina between dyslectics and others (reference: Mind, Brain and Education). Another fact is that paintings made by chimpanzees and elephants have been rated as very good by critics. Art does not even require the same, or even anywhere near (!) the same non-conflating intellect as language does. But the part of artistic skills that covariate with scientific skill is in the brain, consider that apes and elephants just doodle when they get the chance and time to paint (although some art critics have called it “fine abstract non-figurative art”). Today, African hunter-gatherers generally only need to “work” about 3 hours per day, while some Native American tribes in the more hostile climates in America must hunt and gather 12 hours per day to survive, despite functionally equal technology. Those Native American tribes make much less art, and what art they do is visibly affected by lack of time, compared to African hunter-gatherers. Poorer technology in the distant past explains why there is no art from the lower Paleolithic, and environmental factors explain why the necessary leisure was first achieved in Africa.

It is often claimed that Einstein was religious, but in fact he did not believe in a personal God, he just used the word “God” as a metaphor for the laws of physics, so only an insanely fanatic word-splitter can call Einstein religious. Apart from smartheads who just use the word “God” as a metaphor for the laws of nature, it is also possible to believe in a personal God for cultural reasons (at least until long as hard scientific evidence that there is no way God can possibly exist appears, which it may or may not at some point in the future), because of ignorance, or because one is dying, and still be smart. It is the individuals with a need for supernatural explanations that are stupid. Retards in general make up simplified explanations quickly and rarely if ever doubt them, and are worried or get angry if others say that they are wrong.

To stop the dumb actions that are going on in the world, smart people should stop sharing technology with unreasonable fools. If you have smart ideas, only share them with other reasonable smart people who can also handle them wisely, and of course explain to them why it is dangerous to share technology with unreasonable fools. Do NOT share technology with them as long as they deny the danger of sharing technology with fools or believe in modulist brain theories (modulist brain theories are incompatible with the warning about the danger of sharing technology with fools), because smartheads who are ignorant of the danger of sharing technology with fools may spread inventions to fools. And of course it is important to spread this warning to all smartheads.

The fact that mainstream psychologists deny the existence of rational decision-making proves that the fools must (currently) be a population majority. There must, however, exist individuals who make rational decisions anyway, because there are no way beings as irrational as mainstream psychologists think humans are could have created modern science and technology on their own. The emergent nature of consciousness debunks any claims that all humans should be psychologically near-identical just because of their genetic near-identity. Cultural “universals” does NOT prove computational instinct (also consider the rapid evolution argument) but can be explained by practical need and some degree of insight, and differing motivations for similar behavior does NOT prove after-construct but can instead be explained by the theoretical approximation built from its clues and not separate from them that science and proto-science always develops along.

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April 22, 2012 at 3:01 pm
- Random Tangents says:
  
  Don’t spam my blog. If you want to reblog and track back to this that’s great, but your comment is inappropriately long. You have 48 hours to copy and paste this somewhere before I delete it.
  
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  April 25, 2012 at 9:16 pm