The function of religion

Quite apart from the issue of whether a (or any) religion is valid, i.e. describes some aspect of reality, it seems to serve several important functions. It provides a "pre-history" which describes the beginning of the world. In societies in which there is little control of conditions or where food is scarce or requires skill to obtain, religion offers magical and ritual methods of attempting to exert control. Whether through invocation of game animals or placating gods supposed to be in charge of a particular aspect of life, such as weather, war, and so on, this aspect of early religions offers members a way of feeling they have control over important parts of their life that are really chance.

When the rituals don't work and the god(s) don't perform up to specifications, we develop a system to account for the failures of the magic: we imagine trickster gods or bad gods who oppose good gods. If the good god magic doesn't work, there must be another god who sabotaged it. Every culture of which I am aware has developed in this direction.

Since life is so manifestly unfair and since we so badly want it to be fair, we incorporate in our religions conditions that reconcile the unfairness. The more unfair and out of control things become in our lives, the more we seek a religious justification and rationale. I wonder if, as things get more erratic and unjust in our "democracy", we might not expect to see a surge of interest in the more extreme aspects of religion? Clearly we need better and more powerful magic; clearly we need to make more fairness, no matter who we have to go to war with.

Anger as a mental illness

We don't hesitate to classify chronic sadness as an illness. Depression is a serious disorder, resulting in many deaths and what is almost as bad, lives with all the joy emptied out. Chronic anxiety is also an illness. Anxiety shortens lives and makes most events fear-producing (not that there are not genuine reasons for anxiety at times). Chronic anger, however, has never been classified as a "mental illness", though it probably costs more lives than the first two together. It has broken many marriages and families, stressed people to the maximum and ruined their health. Why don't we see this as an illness deserving serious study and treatment?

It occurs to me that we as a nation (USA) see anger generally as a "good thing". We live in denial as to its toxic qualities and life-damaging effects. We love movies in which the good guy, having been suitably mistreated in the early part of the film, rises in righteous indignation and smites the bad guys in bloody and exciting ways. Consider the "Die Hard" movies, the movies starring Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger or... there are really too many to enumerate. I like them too. When Dirty Harry lets 'em have it, I feel the same rush of satisfaction that the rest of the audience does. Our TV shows are full of it (anger, I mean), and we all watch them.

It's a way of life for us. We seem to need the thrill of knowing we are absolutely RIGHT and justified in whatever we do to take vengeance on the wicked. I find the same reaction in myself much of the time. In real life (whatever that may be) I'm rarely certain that I'm right. I'm possessed by the nagging feeling that perhaps the other person(s) may be right, that maybe I've missed something or misunderstood something. So when the time comes that I KNOW they are wrong and I'm RIGHT, I love the rush of adrenaline that spikes my righteous wrath. There's a thrill to "letting it go", even though I know it's bad for me and bad for relationships.

Maybe I don't want to see chronic anger as an illness. Where would we be without it? Would we still belong to Great Britain? Would we be able to stand up for ourselves and fight back without it? We as a nation were founded on rebellion and righteous wrath. Many of us espouse Christianity or Buddhism, which certainly do not encourage revenge or anger, but that doesn't even slow us down; in some cases it may make us worse because it makes us RIGHTER.

So I'm wondering if the reason we don't recognize chronic anger as the sickness it is, is because we like it too much.

Thought Experiment II

Suppose we were able to design a computer that can pass the Turing test, and let us further suppose that it has awareness of self, although we really can't define it. At keast it reports that it has self-awareness, awareness of itself in time and space. Now let us suppose that at any given moment we can turn it off, "freezing" all the circuits as they are at that moment, and then at some later moment turn it back on.

When it is on again, it reports that there is no lapse of awareness, just a lapse in time. In other words, it experienced restarting as a simple continuation of its previous functioning. This experience and report is essentially identical to what we humans experience when we are anaesthetized. We "go to sleep", and when we recover consciousness, we don't experience a lapse of personal awareness, just a lapse in time. We become unconscious at 1 pm and recover our consciousness, little the worse for wear, at 5 pm. We are the same person we were when we became unconscious.

Now reconsider with me the previous "thought experiment". In it we considered the plight of a person who could (through some advanced technology) be completely deconstructed and destroyed, then rebuilt at another place and time exactly as it was when deconstructed. It was possible to conclude that there would be literally no way, even in theory, to reconstruct the experience of the person who was deconstructed. The replica or reconstruction would experience exactly what the person or computer in the first example might experience. It "went to sleep" and then "woke up" at a later time with no experience of lapse of selfhood. But the original, the one who was destroyed, might have experienced total and irrevocable death, and as a result there would be no way to recapture its experience of termination.

The problem seems to arise from the way in which we think of consciousness. We tend to think of it as a unique phenomenon, unique to each one of us, and not in itself replicable. However, we also know that every person (and probably some animals) experience their identical awareness as unique. So, is the reawakened or reconstituted computer or person experiencing the "same" or a "different" consciousness? When we think of the computer, replaced atom for atom, reporting in its reconstructed state that it is "the same" as it was before destruction, does that mean that somehow identity has been passed along with the sense of consciousness?

I think it begins to seem that we make a mistake when we equate consciousness with self-awareness. We think of self-awareness as unique to each of us, but consciousness is simply a kind of functioning that animals and people can have without requiring that self-awareness be part of that consciousness. In the original thought experiment, it was posited that the process of destruction of the original could fail, and as a result both the original and the reconstructed person/computer would be identical and in effect be the same person. This now appears to me to be a difficult concept only because we equate self-awareness with consciousness. Both the original and the replication would be conscious. Both would have whatever self-awareness that accompanies consciousness on that level. To consider which is the original person now becomes meaningless. They are both the original. They both are conscious. They both have self-awareness. Each awareness is immediately different from the other because each now has different input, so off goes their consciousness marching to a different tune.

I'm still thinking about it.