Sacred Technologies: the Evolution of Religious Cognitive Niche

<p>Most cognitive studies of religion adopt a modular theory of cognition. The 'space'that is studied is often the 'space between the ears'. Culture and religion are viewed as by-products of more entrenched features of our brains. Although this 'Standard Model' explains many intuitive expressions of religious belief, it has trouble explaining (a) the variability of religious systems crossculturally (b) the uses of material culture (i.e. symbolic structures etc) in transmitting religious concepts. The following thesis presents a 'wideware mind' hypothesis for religious cognition. I urge that while our internal cognitive architecture is causally relevant to religious cognition, the material artefacts of culture must be viewed as cognitive properties in their own right. Hence any causal account of religious cognition must acknowledge the external features of minds and how our neurological resources interact with the artefacts of our world.</p>

Sacred Technologies: the Evolution of Religious Cognitive Niche

<p>Most cognitive studies of religion adopt a modular theory of cognition. The 'space'that is studied is often the 'space between the ears'. Culture and religion are viewed as by-products of more entrenched features of our brains. Although this 'Standard Model' explains many intuitive expressions of religious belief, it has trouble explaining (a) the variability of religious systems crossculturally (b) the uses of material culture (i.e. symbolic structures etc) in transmitting religious concepts. The following thesis presents a 'wideware mind' hypothesis for religious cognition. I urge that while our internal cognitive architecture is causally relevant to religious cognition, the material artefacts of culture must be viewed as cognitive properties in their own right. Hence any causal account of religious cognition must acknowledge the external features of minds and how our neurological resources interact with the artefacts of our world.</p>

Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution

Our hominin ancestors inevitably encountered and likely ingested psychedelic mushrooms throughout their evolutionary history. This assertion is supported by current understanding of: early hominins’ paleodiet and paleoecology; primate phylogeny of mycophagical and self-medicative behaviors; and the biogeography of psilocybin-containing fungi. These lines of evidence indicate mushrooms (including bioactive species) have been a relevant resource since the Pliocene, when hominins intensified exploitation of forest floor foods. Psilocybin and similar psychedelics that primarily target the serotonin 2A receptor subtype stimulate an active coping strategy response that may provide an enhanced capacity for adaptive changes through a flexible and associative mode of cognition. Such psychedelics also alter emotional processing, self-regulation, and social behavior, often having enduring effects on individual and group well-being and sociality. A homeostatic and drug instrumentalization perspective suggests that incidental inclusion of psychedelics in the diet of hominins, and their eventual addition to rituals and institutions of early humans could have conferred selective advantages. Hominin evolution occurred in an ever-changing, and at times quickly changing, environmental landscape and entailed advancement into a socio-cognitive niche, i.e., the development of a socially interdependent lifeway based on reasoning, cooperative communication, and social learning. In this context, psychedelics’ effects in enhancing sociality, imagination, eloquence, and suggestibility may have increased adaptability and fitness. We present interdisciplinary evidence for a model of psychedelic instrumentalization focused on four interrelated instrumentalization goals: management of psychological distress and treatment of health problems; enhanced social interaction and interpersonal relations; facilitation of collective ritual and religious activities; and enhanced group decision-making. The socio-cognitive niche was simultaneously a selection pressure and an adaptive response, and was partially constructed by hominins through their activities and their choices. Therefore, the evolutionary scenario put forward suggests that integration of psilocybin into ancient diet, communal practice, and proto-religious activity may have enhanced hominin response to the socio-cognitive niche, while also aiding in its creation. In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion, imposing a systematic bias on the selective environment that favored selection for prosociality in our lineage.

Music, bonding, and human evolution: A critique

Savage et al. propose that music filled a hypothetical “bonding gap” in human sociality by Baldwinian gene-culture coevolution (or protracted cognitive niche construction). Both these stepping stones to an evolutionary account of the function and origin of music are problematic. They are scrutinized in this commentary, and an alternative is proposed.

Cognitive niche

In a joint publication with Alfred Russell Wallace, Charles Darwin presented the theory which stated that all life forms were developed by natural selection in which the fight for survival had the effect similar to artificial intelligence applied to selective breeding. Despite a coincidence of views concerning the origin of life, these two scientists had their disagreements. Wallace argued that intelligence could have never arisen through the process of natural adaptation, but rather as a consequence of intelligent design. On the other hand, Darwin insisted that human intelligence could only be explained by the theory of evolution. This difference in point of views on the matter is a manifestation of the difference in the efforts to answer the question: "Why are people so intelligent?" In this context, the main aim of the study is to present a literature review concerning evolutionary psychology and to provide an explanation of the evolution of human intelligence. In other words, the study seeks to explain why people are able to accomplish such intellectual exploits as the ones found in mathematics, science, philosophy, law, etc., bearing in mind that such abilities or talents cannot be found in the original human habitat. The results have showed that evolutionary psychologists consider humans to be so intelligent due to the fact that they have evolved to fill the "cognitive niche". The cognitive niche is a survival mode characterized by managing the environment through mediating cognition and social cooperation.

The elephant in the China shop: When technical reasoning meets cumulative technological culture

The commentaries have both revealed the implications of and challenged our approach. In this response, we reply to these concerns, discuss why the technical-reasoning hypothesis does not minimize the role of social-learning mechanisms – nor assume that technical-reasoning skills make individuals omniscient technically – and make suggestions for overcoming the classical opposition between the cultural versus cognitive niche hypothesis of cumulative technological culture.

The Literary Designer Environments of Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Poetics

This chapter revisits earlier accounts of distributed cognition in cultural environments and practices. It extends the notion of designer environment (i.e. spatial and procedural arrangements that amplify and scaffold cognition) beyond the usual focus on problem-solving and the task at hand. For outlining the complex capacities that come into play with the linguistic, cultural and literary contexts of literary designer environment, it draws on the critical and literary writings developed by Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. In particular, these literary designer environments enable fictional extensions of thought where immersive experience and abstract reflection can be combined. The article discusses individual literary texts and the larger intertextual net of literature in terms of the designer environment and suggests to broaden the perspectives from distributed cognition, the cognitive niche and scaffolded learning to include these.