> But the traditional gods didn't represent the unknowns, but rather the > knowns. A sun god rose every day and set every night in a regular > pattern. Other things which also happened in this same regular pattern > were adjunct characteristics of the sun go. Or look at some of their > names, carefully: Aphrodite, she who fucks. I.e., the characteristic > of all Woman that is embodied in eros. (Usually the name isn't quite > that blatant.)
Well yes gods were(are) sort of like distributed knowledge bases. The distributed entity may or may not exist if you took the humans out of the equation. So you nuke the earth when Aphrodite was popular does she still exist? Maybe residual molecular and quantum permutations of some sort distributed but the majority of her existed in social human substrate. She was added to and changed over time, some of the information compressed and extractable lossily but some of the knowledge not extractable beyond compression, distorted and twisted. But she was composed on both known and unknown representation - but contained utility. > Gods represent the regularities of nature, as embodied in our mental > processes without the understanding of how those processes operated. > (Once the processes started being understood, the gods became less > significant.) Yes this is the pattern. I'm arguing that much of our individual and social knowledge has layers and layers directly related to deities and even more so things like taboos, myths, ceremonies, etc. even though many people today totally renounce any sort of religious belief. IOW it is so baked into us, but the question is how much of it is baked into knowledge and intelligence itself. > Sometimes there were chance associations...and these could lead to > strange transformations of myth when things became more understood. In > Sumeria the goddess of love was associated with (identified with) the > evening star and the god of war was associated with (identified with) > the morning star. When knowledge of astronomy advanced it was realized > that those two were identical, and they ended up with Ishtar, the > goddess of Love and War. Because lovers tend to meet in the early > evening, and warriors tend to try to launch the attack as soon as they > can see what's going on (to catch to victims by surprise). > > This is a small part of why I believe that human intelligence is largely > a development from pattern matching. > Certainly and the whole pattern matching function that is in our brains may or may not be entirely the most efficient mechanism available due to the way it has been evolved. Evolution can create extremely efficient mechanisms and also inefficient ones. John ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=79872228-6b2b41
