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From Stewart Brand's The MIT Media Lab: Inventing the Future: After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at it

From Stewart Brand's The MIT Media Lab: Inventing the Future: After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae, sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine— a little deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense, because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’” “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since!

pmoriarty 5y ago
There are dogmatic forms of religion and non-dogmatic forms. The mystics of various religious affiliation sought a direct experience of the transcendent reality, which as an experience itself is beyond dogma (though dogma could play a role in the experience's interpretation).
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Oh I've seen a lot of loops and asked a lot of questions about them. In one particular instance I had logically concluded myself into an extratemporal nihilism, where I forgot that time exists, therefore everything was meaningless. It ended when my friends reminded me that time indeed exists and everything will pass, including this momentary infinity. Your mind is, literally at the biological level, a bunch of loops for electricity to flow through. It's not like your mind channels energy to get rid of it? It's more efficient to hold onto energy, and you need a loop for that to maintain continuous function. Don't mistake the spiral for a loop. It only appears to go around in circles because you're a lesser-dimensional being looking at it from a flat plane. Stars don't have stable orbits, they follow a straight line through warped spacetime. We also travel forwards in time. Everywhere is a point of no return because no place is exactly the same when returned to. Time is change. Evolution is an inevitable phenomena of some law of physics we might as well call God. Nature, like God, is mysterious. The more we learn, the less we know we know. Knowing anything, even a load of nothing, calms the mind. Asking questions is the surest way to engage a brain. Asking difficult questions is like discovering labyrinths. Yes, they're confusing to navigate. Yes, there be monsters. But also, loot and enlightenment. It turns out there's a bit of truth in everything and a byte of lies to chew through to get to the good stuff. Nature protects its bounty. You have teeth for a reason. Brush them and smile. You're God. love expands life life expands consciousness consciousness is vital to space travel travel, without moving.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Helloyello 5y ago
- alexashka 5y ago
  If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion, exactly? The two are inseparable.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion, exactly?" If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need to ask that question. Many have argued that mystical experiences were at the core of every major religion, and it was when people stopped having these experiences that dogma accreted.
    - sweuder 5y ago
      What is a mystical experience then? I would suppose that it went something like: 1. Person sees/experiences something interesting/abnormal/rare 2. Can't figure out how to explain what happened 3. Attributes experience to god/religion Once we started filling in that middle bit there was less around that could only be attributed to religion so it lost a lot of its draw. Now that we are closer to a state where we can attribute most things to nature/science/etc religion does seem to be left with mostly dogma.
    - alexashka 5y ago
      > If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need to ask that question. Please speak for yourself. > Many have argued... Many have argued that slaves are totally fine and that we ought to continue having them. Or that burning witches works. So what? That's not an argument for or against anything - it is at best entertaining trivia to bring up at cocktail hour.
  - namlem 5y ago
    That's a very limited view of religion. Think of religions as frameworks for interpreting the world. You don't need dogma to be an effective framework. Plus, not all religions are dogmatic, in fact most aren't. The Abrahamic faiths are the exceptions, not the rule.
throwawayse 5y ago
fractallyte 5y ago
An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/). The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than my one-sentence summary...)
- colordrops 5y ago
  How far Scientific American has fallen, catching its own culture war virus.
replygirl 5y ago
> “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. this breaks down when you remember that contemporary science emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries out of the work of people like newton and kant who saw themselves as engaged in a (partially) theological pursuit. > You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’ this is actually a pretty active inquiry in theological circles, and one of the sources of difference between Christian sects. although us Christians tend to frame it more from a creationist perspective as "what sort of entity is God and what bearing would that have on the way we see God's creation and custodianship of the world". much like with science, faith does not preclude curiosity for the reigious.
disambiguation 5y ago
Replace "who made God" with "who made 1 = 1" Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality.
- alexashka 5y ago
  > Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality. By who, and to what end? Most people don't even know what an axiom is. Axioms are for playing logic games in math land - there is no reason why we should adopt a similar approach to everyday life. Let me explain something about useful interpretations - we call those science. Science is when you go on to see what is, repeatedly, verifiably so. I challenge you to find a more useful interpretation of reality, than one that we can replicate trillions of times, reliably, to achieve wonders no human thought possible a hundred years ago.
  - disambiguation 5y ago
    Relax! I'm pro-science, bro. I'm not pushing an agenda, simply pointing out Minsky's hypocrisy. He thinks he's transcending the "loop" of ideology, but really just displacing one with another. But thanks anyway for the patronizing explanation that absolutely no one asked for.
    - alexashka 5y ago
      The scientific method and accepting axioms because they are 'useful' or for any other wishy-washy reason are incompatible. Sorry.
- Banana699 5y ago
  >who made 1 = 1 The nervous system of every single animal in existence, unlike the existence of god. >because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality The problem is consensus and alternatives. If you reject the traditional answer of "1+1" and go for one of its many, many very convincing alternatives, would anybody go after you with a fork and threateningly insist you follow the $one_true_interpretation? That's what (organized Abrahamic) religions are usually criticized for, "useful" is entirely irrelevant and dependent on the objective function used, the real test of an ideology is : what if somebody chooses a different objective function? because (organized Abrahamic) religions are often totalitarian, they cope very badly with some nodes refusing the general consensus.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
While science is a method and not a dogma, a lot of dogma gets called science and treated with exactly the kind of religious fervour science is supposed to be able to cut through. The number of people who could not run an experiment or parse a research paper exhorting everyone to 'trust The Science' over the last two years truly irritated me, less so for the religious beliefs they were pushing than how enthusiastically they were diluting the meaning of science as a method.
sva_ 5y ago
> The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. I've recently been thinking that the main reason why certain religions/ideologies are so popular, is in fact, because they release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life. There is this idea about the brain, that it tries to optimize energy-usage, and if you don't have to ask yourself these fundamental questions all the time, you can spend brainpower on other things. So people naturally follow a regime of dogmas proposed by some authority, to focus on other things in life. Or as an evolutionary argument: Those who had the luxury of ignoring contemplating their own existence, had the privilege of spending their brainpower on things that helped their community and subsequently helped it spread. About the topic at hand: I think this modular approach to the mind is misguided. By now I'm almost certain that the brain is compositional, instead. These phenomena described by Minsky surely are emergent, or at least most of them.
- breck 5y ago
  I've been coming around to this as well, which surprised me as I thought I had left religion for good. > release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life. I'd even modify this to say "impossible burden". Science reduces to the model: P(A|B). No model is ever safe, since we can never observe the generator of B, and changes in B can turn the whole model irrelevant. So the pursuit of some perfect scientific model of the world is an endeavor with 0% probability of success. Hence, it seems the wiser strategy is to have a strategic balance between religion and science. What that split is, and whether it's most advantageous to do so at the society level or society of mind level, I don't know.

pmoriarty 5y ago

There are dogmatic forms of religion and non-dogmatic forms. The mystics of various religious affiliation sought a direct experience of the transcendent reality, which as an experience itself is beyond dogma (though dogma could play a role in the experience's interpretation).

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Oh I've seen a lot of loops and asked a lot of questions about them. In one particular instance I had logically concluded myself into an extratemporal nihilism, where I forgot that time exists, therefore everything was meaningless. It ended when my friends reminded me that time indeed exists and everything will pass, including this momentary infinity. Your mind is, literally at the biological level, a bunch of loops for electricity to flow through. It's not like your mind channels energy to get rid of it? It's more efficient to hold onto energy, and you need a loop for that to maintain continuous function. Don't mistake the spiral for a loop. It only appears to go around in circles because you're a lesser-dimensional being looking at it from a flat plane. Stars don't have stable orbits, they follow a straight line through warped spacetime. We also travel forwards in time. Everywhere is a point of no return because no place is exactly the same when returned to. Time is change. Evolution is an inevitable phenomena of some law of physics we might as well call God. Nature, like God, is mysterious. The more we learn, the less we know we know. Knowing anything, even a load of nothing, calms the mind. Asking questions is the surest way to engage a brain. Asking difficult questions is like discovering labyrinths. Yes, they're confusing to navigate. Yes, there be monsters. But also, loot and enlightenment. It turns out there's a bit of truth in everything and a byte of lies to chew through to get to the good stuff. Nature protects its bounty. You have teeth for a reason. Brush them and smile. You're God. love expands life life expands consciousness consciousness is vital to space travel travel, without moving.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Helloyello 5y ago
alexashka 5y ago
If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion, exactly? The two are inseparable.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion, exactly?" If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need to ask that question. Many have argued that mystical experiences were at the core of every major religion, and it was when people stopped having these experiences that dogma accreted.
  - sweuder 5y ago
    What is a mystical experience then? I would suppose that it went something like: 1. Person sees/experiences something interesting/abnormal/rare 2. Can't figure out how to explain what happened 3. Attributes experience to god/religion Once we started filling in that middle bit there was less around that could only be attributed to religion so it lost a lot of its draw. Now that we are closer to a state where we can attribute most things to nature/science/etc religion does seem to be left with mostly dogma.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    > If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need to ask that question. Please speak for yourself. > Many have argued... Many have argued that slaves are totally fine and that we ought to continue having them. Or that burning witches works. So what? That's not an argument for or against anything - it is at best entertaining trivia to bring up at cocktail hour.
- namlem 5y ago
  That's a very limited view of religion. Think of religions as frameworks for interpreting the world. You don't need dogma to be an effective framework. Plus, not all religions are dogmatic, in fact most aren't. The Abrahamic faiths are the exceptions, not the rule.

throwawayse 5y ago

fractallyte 5y ago

An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/). The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than my one-sentence summary...)

colordrops 5y ago
How far Scientific American has fallen, catching its own culture war virus.

replygirl 5y ago

> “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. this breaks down when you remember that contemporary science emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries out of the work of people like newton and kant who saw themselves as engaged in a (partially) theological pursuit. > You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’ this is actually a pretty active inquiry in theological circles, and one of the sources of difference between Christian sects. although us Christians tend to frame it more from a creationist perspective as "what sort of entity is God and what bearing would that have on the way we see God's creation and custodianship of the world". much like with science, faith does not preclude curiosity for the reigious.

disambiguation 5y ago

Replace "who made God" with "who made 1 = 1" Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality.

alexashka 5y ago
> Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality. By who, and to what end? Most people don't even know what an axiom is. Axioms are for playing logic games in math land - there is no reason why we should adopt a similar approach to everyday life. Let me explain something about useful interpretations - we call those science. Science is when you go on to see what is, repeatedly, verifiably so. I challenge you to find a more useful interpretation of reality, than one that we can replicate trillions of times, reliably, to achieve wonders no human thought possible a hundred years ago.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Relax! I'm pro-science, bro. I'm not pushing an agenda, simply pointing out Minsky's hypocrisy. He thinks he's transcending the "loop" of ideology, but really just displacing one with another. But thanks anyway for the patronizing explanation that absolutely no one asked for.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    The scientific method and accepting axioms because they are 'useful' or for any other wishy-washy reason are incompatible. Sorry.
Banana699 5y ago
>who made 1 = 1 The nervous system of every single animal in existence, unlike the existence of god. >because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality The problem is consensus and alternatives. If you reject the traditional answer of "1+1" and go for one of its many, many very convincing alternatives, would anybody go after you with a fork and threateningly insist you follow the $one_true_interpretation? That's what (organized Abrahamic) religions are usually criticized for, "useful" is entirely irrelevant and dependent on the objective function used, the real test of an ideology is : what if somebody chooses a different objective function? because (organized Abrahamic) religions are often totalitarian, they cope very badly with some nodes refusing the general consensus.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

While science is a method and not a dogma, a lot of dogma gets called science and treated with exactly the kind of religious fervour science is supposed to be able to cut through. The number of people who could not run an experiment or parse a research paper exhorting everyone to 'trust The Science' over the last two years truly irritated me, less so for the religious beliefs they were pushing than how enthusiastically they were diluting the meaning of science as a method.

sva_ 5y ago

> The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. I've recently been thinking that the main reason why certain religions/ideologies are so popular, is in fact, because they release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life. There is this idea about the brain, that it tries to optimize energy-usage, and if you don't have to ask yourself these fundamental questions all the time, you can spend brainpower on other things. So people naturally follow a regime of dogmas proposed by some authority, to focus on other things in life. Or as an evolutionary argument: Those who had the luxury of ignoring contemplating their own existence, had the privilege of spending their brainpower on things that helped their community and subsequently helped it spread. About the topic at hand: I think this modular approach to the mind is misguided. By now I'm almost certain that the brain is compositional, instead. These phenomena described by Minsky surely are emergent, or at least most of them.

breck 5y ago
I've been coming around to this as well, which surprised me as I thought I had left religion for good. > release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life. I'd even modify this to say "impossible burden". Science reduces to the model: P(A|B). No model is ever safe, since we can never observe the generator of B, and changes in B can turn the whole model irrelevant. So the pursuit of some perfect scientific model of the world is an endeavor with 0% probability of success. Hence, it seems the wiser strategy is to have a strategic balance between religion and science. What that split is, and whether it's most advantageous to do so at the society level or society of mind level, I don't know.