> 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

> 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.