I heven’t yet reread, with laptop to hand, Pascal Boyer, though I know that I will. It is one of those books that requires innocent (at least not guilty) contemplation; but the idea that has stuck with me as I go along is is the sheer disconnection and autonomy of our reasoning processes. This is he uses as his general explanaiton of the religious imagination: our tendency thio think in autonomous, unconscious threads, or deamons, each running simple programs continually.<\/p>\n\n
This needn’t be cognitive dissonance<\/em> — two threads may not conflict at all, and the dissonance only comes when two incompatible conclusions are generated by two processes (probably both unconscious) acting on the same input. But it does account for the extraordinary ways in which people are fragmentary and inconsistent, without any central authority. This is a particular sort of society of the mind, on which the great baronies are self-sustaining and largely independent, though all will pay homage to the central court. In fact, what I suffer from is cognitive feudalism.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I heven’t yet reread, with laptop to hand, Pascal Boyer, though I know that I will. It is one of those books that requires innocent (at least not guilty) contemplation; but the idea that has stuck with me as I … Continue reading