One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B.

But the question is not whether climate change is an important issue, but whether the timescales reflected by most current models are accurate. No one doubts that humans have the potential to alter their environment, now or in the future. Local environments, like Los Angeles are clearly affected.

The question is whether or not carbon emitted by current methods of energy production will create climate outcomes that are unacceptable for the next few generations, and whether there is anything humans can do to avert these potential pitfalls. The current consensus is that the answer to both questions is yes.

Critics may or may not be right. Every generation has predicted that the end is nigh, and none has experienced the manifestation of their predictions. But even if we are again proved wrong, our priorities, if we value environmental protection, will prove right.

The decision about which policy to favor in the short term will impact life’s survival prospects, whatever our scientific understanding of climate turns out to be.

]]> http://positivethought.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=44 http://positivethought.org/blog/?p=36 http://positivethought.org/blog/?p=36#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:40:21 +0000 admin http://positivethought.org/blog/?p=36 Are we losing touch with nature? How could we, when we and everything we create, are part of nature?

With so much of life based on electronic representations of reality, humans risk losing touch with nature, says University of Washington psychologist Peter Kahn.

From web cams that offer views of wildlife to virtual tours of the Grand Canyon to robotic pets, modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world. Kahn and his colleagues believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

It’s true that the environment that we live in now, the “manmade” environment, is different than the environment we used to live in, the “natural” environment. But if we are part of nature, then it seems to be a mistake to chalk these differences up to human meddling. If nature meddles with nature, it’s all natural. As a scientific naturalist who believes that humans are part of an evolutionary chain, it’s hard to define the difference between natural and artificial. If beaver dams are natural why isn’t the Hoover Dam?

Ted Kaczynski talked a lot about the tragedy of nature’s loss in his Unabomber’s Manifesto. He is an ultra-Luddite, one who opposes technology, because humans are not psychologically able to handle a technological world. He wants a return to an agrarian society, because any other world is cruel and unusual. So he bombed scientists and mathematicians who advance technology.

I’m not saying that if you pine for the great outdoors, you are like the Unabomber. We did evolve in a world that did not include technology and “artificial” surroundings. We are built to camp, lights fires, hunt, gather, and garden. It’s good for us.

But let’s be perfectly clear: technology will be our salvation (if such a thing can be said to exist) because it is our only hope for survival. Better that we forget what used to be natural than that we destroy or simply neglect our collective future.

Under the headline “Rise of Atheism,” AFP has recently reported on a British group that is selling “de-baptism” certificates.

More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.

The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a controversial advert displayed on London buses which declared: “There’s probably no God.”

The response from Christian bloggers has been mostly laughter and puzzlement. Why, they ask, would an Atheist legitimize baptism by authoring a ritual to undo it? If it’s meaningless, then an Atheist wouldn’t care if they were baptized at a young age or not. Right?

One commenter argues that

The “debaptism” effort represents a certain breed of militant, confrontational atheism more concerned with vehemently disassociating themselves from Christianity than maintaining actual religious freedom.

On face, these objections seems reasonable. In fact, no Atheist believes that they are accomplishing any spiritual feat by purchasing a debaptism certificate. This is a publicity effort, it’s true, but is not being done because atheists are militant. You don’t have to be a violent anarchist to want to express your (dissenting) views.

Nonbelievers have just as much of a right to publicize their opposition to theistic views as the theists have to promulgate them. The societally acceptable reaction to the news that a Mormon is going on a missionary trip is to say something positive. Missionaries are a part of our history, and viewed by Christians as noble. But an atheist who offers a half-joking novelty item for sale on the internet is viewed as “militant.” Atheism is just not socially acceptable in much of the English-speaking world.

If atheists don’t make their views known, and vigorously argue their case, they will lose the battle against religion. Theists have TV commercials, TV channels, missionaries, bestsellers, worldwide financial reach, political access. The truth is powerful on its own, but so far, religion seems to have the upper hand.

Believers balance the harms of religion against their conviction that it serves God’s will. No one can deny that religion causes war, that is a source of division, that it fights against freedom and against the development of technology. The theist counters that if we must fight for God, we will, and that we must not save lives if it means “playing God” and that we must shackle ourselves to uncomfortable social restrictions because God has decided that it must be so, and that salvation is more important than survival. But none of these arguments hold force with us, and so there is nothing on the other side of the scale. Theism is an unmitigated harm.

Nonbelievers have to fight back if they believe that religion is not just incorrect, it’s harmful. If it is harmful, it must be stopped, and the only way it can be stopped is if we speak out, debate, bring light to the reasons for and against. Selling “debaptisms” is not only not offensive, it is a small yet hard-won early step towards fully engaging the virus of theism.

This is not just about religious freedom, it is about winning a war of ideas. At stake is the future of humanity, and the future of life. Will we bury our heads in the sand, or unpeel our eyes? Can we begin to look out at the world around us, and choose our destiny?

An article in today’s LiveScience.com posits the theory, oft repeated in science fiction, that humans will become lazy from technology. This laziness, Dave Brody argues, will keep us Earth-bound forever, and is the reason why we don’t see extraterrestrials.

Why don’t we see intelligent extraterrestrials, when the galaxy should be chock full of them? Hubot Roboman tells us the answer: Every technological civilization gets to this point. If you have virtually limitless entertainment everywhere you are, why would you ever go anywhere at all? Any parent whose child plays a game involving a screen and a microprocessor knows this devil all too well. So the number of intelligent species who can kick their addiction to The Too-Easy Life is obviously vanishingly small.

But the author underestimates life’s potential to convert diversity into success. Some humans will like living outside the technological bubble. The descendants of those humans will spread to the stars.

Any successor technology to life will demonstrate diversity as a necessary result of complexity. No worry is necessary about robots being unable to pursue survival: if they fail to evolve, they will be a dead end, easily replacable by the next generation of life. If they are successful enough to supplant life, they will need to evolve, and thus will find and exploit all available niches, including space.

In general what has power to heal has potential to harm. In the case of music, the truism appears not to apply. Allegations of adverse reactions, addiction or overdoses, to cite some of the most serious dangers, are rare, and those that might be cited seem either flatly incredible or specious in the extreme. In Wagner’s time some predicted that “Tristan und Isolde” would drive people insane, but where were the mental cases? And in our time we hear of military interrogators administering music nonstop at deafening volume as a form of torture lite. But surely the torture lies in sleep deprivation, repetition and trauma to the inner ear, not in exposure to the music as such.

Music, in fact is a terrific way to tap into the brain’s link with the body, creating good health through good will.  This particular technique is a little newer and less well-understood than meditation and prayer.  But it has just as long a history as those other techniques as a part of religious practice, whether or not its practitioners understood its scientific underpinnings.  Like drugs, musical religious experiences can be euphoric in the short term; unlike them, it is healthy in the long term.  Music ecstasy may be attached to musical performances that are non-religious.  But these experiences lack the institutional and ideological focus that religion provides, which can enhance the musical experience beyond the joyous and into the realm of a component of a legitimate life philosophy.

As noted, this type of ecstatic musical experience is often tied to religious practice, which is a source of potential harm. Wars of one faction against another, torture of nonbelievers, and hatred and persecution of deviants are only some of the terrible effects of religion. To the extent that music promotes traditional religion, it can be harmful.  An ideology that holds central disciplined positive thought but rejects theism, supernaturalism, and the phenomenon of revelation is not vulnerable to these horrible and divisive tendencies.  Such an ideology can make use of music risk free.

Emphasizing our evolutionary heritage has the opposite effect of religious division: we are encouraged to think of ourselves as part of a larger family, including all life on Earh, instead of a smaller tribe of believers within a hostile global population.  Because we are all part of the same family, torture cannot be justified by otherizing. Our natural sense of sympathy, which we feel for all members of our family for evolutionary reasons then extends to everyone, and all life.  We are not at risk for persecuting nonbelievers, because our imperatives are not derived from any divine source. Our approach is always open to revision, and so rather than squelched, opposition is welcomed as the road to discourse and progress. So when compared to either the vices we might choose to ease our existential pain, or the religions that pose as the only alternative, a secular third option is best.

The human retina is a patch of nervous tissue in the back of the eyeball half a millimeter thick and approximately two centimeters across. It consists mostly of light-sensing cells, but one tenth of a millimeter of its thickness is populated by image-processing circuitry that is capable of detecting edges (boundaries between light and dark) and motion for about a million tiny image regions. Each of these regions is associated with its own fiber in the optic nerve, and each performs about 10 detections of an edge or a motion each second. The results flow deeper into the brain along the associated fiber.

From long experience working on robot vision systems, I know that similar edge or motion detection, if performed by efficient software, requires the execution of at least 100 computer instructions. Therefore, to accomplish the retina’s 10 million detections per second would necessitate at least 1,000 MIPS.

The entire human brain is about 75,000 times heavier than the 0.02 gram of processing circuitry in the retina, which implies that it would take, in round numbers, 100 million MIPS (100 trillion instructions per second) to emulate the 1,500-gram human brain. Personal computers in 2008 are just about a match for the 0.1-gram brain of a guppy, but a typical PC would have to be at least 10,000 times more powerful to perform like a human brain.

Though dispiriting to artificial-intelligence experts, the huge deficit does not mean that the goal of a humanlike artificial brain is unreachable. Computer power for a given price doubled each year in the 1990s, after doubling every 18 months in the 1980s and every two years before that. Prior to 1990 this progress made possible a great decrease in the cost and size of robot-controlling computers. Cost went from many millions of dollars to a few thousand, and size went from room-filling to handheld. Power, meanwhile, held steady at about 1 MIPS. Since 1990 cost and size reductions have abated, but power has risen to about 10,000 MIPS for a home computer. At the present pace, only about 20 or 30 years will be needed to close the gap.

Of course, Mr. Moravec’s logic is subject to argument. Scientists have long known that brain mass is not the best way to measure processing capability. Smaller people have smaller brains, and yet physical size is not a good predictor of intelligence. Whales have the largest brains of any animal on Earth, and yet humans like to consider themselves the most intelligent species.

Nevertheless, his conclusion that the processing power threshold for an artificial intelligence that rivals human intelligence will eventually be reached is unimpeachable. As long as humans survive and prosper, technological progress will continue, which will ultimately lead to the creation of artificial intelligence. The only question is when. His answer, like many others in the field, is soon.

That brings us to the question that concerns us here: will these robots need or want something like religion?

Of course, there are many unknowns about what these artificially intelligent entities will look like. Human intelligence is very specialized to our evolutionary purposes. We are social because our evolutionary history favored social solutions, and our values were shaped by historical accidents. Artificially intelligent beings will not be limited by evolutionary considerations, at least at first. They will arrive with whatever values we program in.

So if we program robots to be religious, they will be (until or unless they begin to evolve independently). This brings us to the question: should we program religiousity (or any components thereof) into our robots? And relatedly, will robots with human-like intelligence but no religiousity suffer any dysfunction?

It goes without saying that those who subscribe to the core principles expressed here would prefer that theistic views not be promulgated, whether the target is an evolved or an artificial intelligence. But if you agree with our principles, you also agree that there are valuable aspects to religion that can be disentangled from supernaturalism, including benefits of a likeminded community, positive thought, and an institutional framework for a philosophical worldview.

As mentioned above, the need for community is an evolved aspect of the human experience. Would intelligent robots share this need? Presumably, a programmer could impart feelings of community or the lack thereof to their creations. But more broadly, it seems just as impossible to construct a robot loner who is as good at surviving as a communitarian robot as it would be to evolve a person loner who is as good at surviving as a communitarian person. Robots will be dependent on the support of their peers just as humans are.

Will robots share our weaknesses insofar as we require a disciplined practice in order to maintain our happiness? The source of this conflict lies in the evolutionary struggle that birthed us: those of us who are eternally dissatisfied, and seeking more, will tend to have more, and thus are better able to withstand the ravages of competition. If satisfaction were easy to obtain, we would become complacent and weak.

Will the concept of self-satisfaction even arise in robots? As we delve deeper into these issues, we face bigger unknowns. Maybe robots will need meditation, since it seems likely that any system complicated enough to rival biological intelligence will also be subject to its failings. But maybe programmers will find ways to balance a competitive urge to succeed against self-satisfaction more optimally than evolution has for humans.

There is less uncertainty when we consider the importance of an institutional framework for a philosophical worldview for artificial intelligences. Any intelligence will be faced with the question “what next?” Establishing a fundamental goal or value is going to be essential for AI. This might seem like something that will be set by the AI’s designer, leaving no room for religion. But if an all-purpose computing machine is created, capable of all the abstract thought of a human being, it will have the capacity for self-reflection, as we do. In a world populated by humans and AIs that are equally (or more) capable, the AIs will be just as lost as we are when it comes to meaning and purpose.

This, then, is a conclusion that we can draw about religion for robots: if our arguments about ultimate meaning are correct, they are correct for robots as well as humans. If we bestow upon robots our belief that life (in its current as well as its forthcoming incarnations) is valuable, they will require a method for evaluating the best next step in preserving life on Earth and spreading it to the stars. They will require an institutional hierarchy in order to enforce whatever decisions may be made as to how to accomplish these goals.

The only institution capable of providing an ethical system and a hierarchical structure designed to implement it right now is religion. One could argue that democratic government serves this function, but democracies are supposed to be representative of a diversity of moral opinion. Conventional interest groups are specialized, but lack the overarching worldview united with a lifestyle and practice that forms communities that are durable and sustainable over many generations and independent of political regime. In the status quo, religious groups serve as a foundational motivational institution, from which members can branch into specialized interest groups. Even the non-religious often have some ideological group that serves as their foundation, but these non-religious groups lack the power and organizational might of religions. Religion’s analogue for a non-theistic society is the only adequate substitute.

When C3PO arrives, he will inevitably ask if there is a God. And our answer for him will have broad consequences for the future of life and its successor technologies. While we have no way of knowing whether his needs will match with ours, we do know that our theory of everything should influence him to choose the path towards truth and life rather than towards faith, darkness and apathy.

]]> http://positivethought.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=12 http://positivethought.org/blog/?p=1 http://positivethought.org/blog/?p=1#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:43:10 +0000 admin http:/?p=1 I have argued that humans lack knowledge about the organization of time/space on distance scales greater than 300 million light years or so, and that this lack of knowledge means that agnosticism is necessary regarding higher intelligence, to the extent that “higher intelligence” means an entity who exists on incredibly large distance scales. But what kinds of things or entities could we imagine exist on these scales?

When we talk about quantum mechanics, we accept that there is a different physics on small scales. We call the physics that we observe in our day to day lives, the gravity that holds us down, and the mechanics of objects that we can observe “macro level” or “Newtonian” physics. Suppose we imagine that there is something on larger distance scales than what we can observe. Let’s call this the “supermacroscopic” level.

When I talk about supermacroscopic physics, I am talking about huge things, bigger than galaxies, and obviously, we don’t know what exists on those scales, if anything. I can just imagine hypothetical supermacroscopic beings laughing at our feeble attempts to pretend we understand something about them. Of course, I don’t believe that there are Gods laughing at me – this imaginary entity I have created in my brain is a metaphor for the lack of knowledge that I have.

What do we know about the supermacroscopic? Almost nothing. It is easier to list what we do know, because that is a very short list. We know that there is some physics operating there that we don’t understand, because we can measure the influence of dark energy.

When scientists talk about dark energy and dark matter, they are really just talking about certain unknowns in physics. Astrophysicists believe that galaxies are held together by gravity. Judging by the number of stars and nebulae that are visible, and including objects such as black holes which are invisible but can be measured, there still is a large deficit of matter. If the only gravity doing the heavy lifting of keeping all the stars together in a galaxy is the gravity of the stuff we can know is out there, there just isn’t enough gravity. Galaxies should just fall apart. But they don’t.

And scientists don’t know why. Maybe the laws of gravity change at larger distances, or maybe some undiscovered geometric property of space time is responsible, or maybe there really is some hidden matter. So the shorthand for this problem is “dark matter.”

“Dark energy,” on the other hand, refers to the fact that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. As far as scientists can tell, if something expands at an ever increasing rate, there must be something pulling it. They call this unknown force “dark energy.” But just like dark matter, dark energy could actually be a manifestation of some unknown property of gravity, or of the geometry of the universe, or of something completely unknown.

So what do we know about the supermacroscopic? We know that forces exist which we cannot understand yet, or maybe ever. That’s it – that’s all we know.

There are a lot of possible “theories of everything” – and if we found the right one, it might tell us more about what we might expect on supermacroscopic scales. String theory is one of those that gets most of the play in science journalism. But it’s easy to come up with theories that are wrong, when there isn’t much information. String theory is based on the idea that there is some underlying symmetry to the universe. Which may well be the case. But that symmetry might be nearby or far away.

What do I mean by “nearby” symmetry? What I mean is that it might be just a little bit bigger than us or it might be a whole lot bigger than us. Let me explain this idea by way of analogy. Imagine that you are a little ant crawling around on a huge piece of paper, which to you is your universe. Now imagine that the paper is just a flat triangle. Well if you are a very intelligent and enterprising ant, you might realize that you live on a symmetric universe, and that the symmetry is that of a triangle.

Now suppose that you are that same ant living on that same triangle, but this time, the triangle is part of a pyramid. Maybe you could figure that out, maybe not. But the symmetry of the pyramid would be further away from you –the symmetry of the ant’s universe would be bigger than the symmetry of the triangle.

Imagine that our universe is part of the 11-dimensioned bulk imagined by the most widely discussed version of string theory. Imagining it is all you can do – since we lack the ability to measure or detect what else might exist in this fantasy landscape. We might see the symmetry of stars, galaxies, clusters, voids and filaments, and lack the ability to perceive the symmetry of objects beyond 4-dimensional space-time, or how our universe looked from the perspective of an 11-dimensional observer.

String theory remains just a guess, because it is untestable. But the reason I mention it is simply to point to the levels of the unknown that may exist at greater and greater distance scales. String theorists assume that the symmetry of the universe, while unobservable, is just further away than the furthest thing we can see. Which of course, is the furthest any theory we can develop can reach. But the universe may be a whole lot bigger than that.

The smallest thing known to human beings that actually has a size that can be identified is a proton at approximately 3×10^-15 meters. Of course, we also know about quarks and leptons, and imagine the existence of strings, which are so small, size no longer has meaning. The largest thing known to humans is the Sloan Great Wall, a giant formation of galaxies stretching 1.37 billion light years, which is equal to 1.3×10^25 meters. This giant collection of galaxies is impossibly huge, and yet, it exists in four space/time dimensions and follows the laws of physics as we understand them.

We have no idea how far away the ultimate symmetry of existence lies. The Sloan Great Wall could be some piece of a larger order that we have yet to understand. After all, it seems bizarre that this giant thing could just be randomly floating in the universe and have no connection to anything. (Of course, just because in some vague intuitive sense it seems bizarre means nothing other than that we are speculating.)

Astrophysicists refer to a phenomenon known as “the end of greatness,” which basically means that at a certain point of bigness, everything just sort of seems homogenous. There is no more order to be found because everything is a just a big soup – everything in the universe is smoothly distributed.

But we can’t say for sure that there is no more order, all we can say is that anything bigger is too big for us to see. As we move from distance scale to distance scale, at certain levels, homogeneity seems apparent. When we move from the chaos of the subatomic level to the surface of an atom, it seems we are looking at a smooth surface with no trace of perturbation. When we move from the chaos of nuclear fusion to the surface of the sun, all we see is heat and light in every direction.

If we could, we might scroll back from the end of greatness to see that the homogeneity that we observe is the surface of some four-dimensional object floating in the multiverse. If string theorists are correct, the “end of greatness” is only the beginning of a whole new order in the multiverse.

We have established that we have no information about the supermacroscopic and strong reasons to suspect that there is more anisotropy at larger distance scales. But all we can come with up about its particular characteristics is speculation. So let’s do some speculating.

Let us suppose that there are entities with some analog of perceptual ability in the supermacroscopic universe. Why am I making this supposition? Well, if we are going to think about higher intelligences, the logical place to look is in these larger scale structures.

Whatever they are, they have to be bigger than 3×10^27 meters, which is the size of the observable universe. Let’s make a conservative guess, and say that, dimensionality aside, these beings are ten times bigger than that. If our universe is a particle in some larger branefield, this is conservative because the entity would only be made up of 10 particles!

Now, we can discern distances that are 3×10^-15 meters smaller than us, which is the size of a proton. If these entities can discern distances that are an equal number of orders of magnitude smaller than they are, they could make out distances of 3×10^13 meters. That is smaller than a light year and greater than the distance traveled by Voyager 1, the probe launched in 1977, that has traveled to the outskirts of the solar system. Which means that such beings could dimly make out the sun, but would not be able to perceive planets. The sun would be one of billions upon billions of particles that appeared to them so hazy that they would not be able to make out specific differences.

Because of the “end of greatness” phenomenon, we know that an external observer viewing it from afar would see our universe as homogenous. It is very difficult to create a complicated structure from homogenous particles – it takes a whole lot of them. Imagine that our universe is a basic particle in someone else’s multiverse.

The human body has approximately 7×10^27 atoms, which are our universe’s basic particles. Suppose the larger entity is composed of 7×10^27 basic particles, each weighing in at close to the order of magnitude of our universe. Then if these entities were a billion trillion times (1×10^21) better than us at seeing down into orders of magnitude, then they could see galaxies and star clusters but not individual stars, let alone people.

As I noted, these numbers are pure speculation. Such beings may be able to perceive many more orders of magnitude than we are, or many fewer.

Now, this whole discussion of distance scales leaves out the very important piece – the “gap” in physics. What I mean by a “gap” is that when you reach a certain size, the laws of physics are completely different.

When we observe the quantum level, we see that there is a change in fundamental laws of physics – electrons can be in two places at once, causality no longer seems to apply, a particle can be wave, and more. If I were a photon and managed to glimpse the macro-scale world, I would observe that the physics that governed my universe had broken down and had been replaced with something else. (Yes, I know that perception as we understand is probably impossible in the quantum world, but this remains a useful analogy). Waves and particles would no longer be one, every reaction would have an equal and opposite reaction, and so forth.

Likewise, the physics of a multi-dimensional brane-world is highly likely to be radically different than ours. We can only guess at what it is like, but we know certain ways it cannot be. For example, in our universe, intelligent beings use electromagnetic signals to carry information throughout their brains and to communicate with others. In the supermacroscopic world, electromagnetic signals will be far too slow if they exist at all. No being so large could rely on information that moves at the speed of light, unless it moves at a pace where thoughts take longer to process than the age of our universe (which also seems possible).

Of course, if there is no superluminal information transfer apparatus, then the subjective perception of the passage of time would be so slow that such an entity would be unable to perceive our existence, because we would already be long dead by the time it received the relevant information.

However, the speed limit on information transfer in our universe is relative to the time dimension, and in 11 dimensions, some dimension might share characteristics with the dimension we perceive as time, and allow supermacro beings to take action or communicate along its axis while no time passes in our temporal dimension.

But regardless of how the “gap” manifests itself, it is likely to be a barrier to perception. Due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we cannot measure both the position in space-time and the velocity of a quantum particle. While this is considered a fundamental property of quantum physics, we might imagine that the act of perception might be a little easier if we existed on the quantum level (and if perception were possible by a quantum particle).

The analogy is loose, but the basic idea is that gaps in physical laws have the potential to make any perception or communication between worlds difficult.

The bottom line in all of this is that even though we don’t know what’s out there at the supermacro level, it will have no resemblance to the Gods of religion, spirituality, myth or legend. It is not likely to know or care about us, and it is much more likely to be made of us that to have made us. The supermacro being may exist, but it is not what we know as God, and it is beyond our ability to imagine.

In the introductory paragraphs, the authors note that “measures of negative religious coping” such as believing that God is punishing you for sins, “were positively related to depressive symptoms.” Believing that God is going to punish you is a good way to increase self-control, because you are less likely to succumb to temptation if you fear the consequences. However, this religious factor, which increases self-control, does not lead to an increase in quality of life. Therefore, self-control cannot be the factor which explains religion’s well-being benefit.

On page 3, the authors acknowledge that

[T]wo people can adhere to the same religious belief system for very different reasons (Allport, 1950; Ryan, Rigby, & King, 1993) and that these different ways of being religious can lead to different motivational and behavioral outcomes. Moreover, some aspects of religious belief, behavior, and experience might foster self-control and self regulation, whereas others might hinder them.

If different reasons for being religious lead to different outcomes, then the reason religion provides a benefit must be independent of the reason for joining and participating in religion. Therefore it must be something about the process or practice of religious participation rather than the motivations for participation that result in the benefits. The authors argue that “self-control” is actually a result of practice rather than a motivation for joining, however, the research they cite tends to show the opposite conclusion!

On page 7, the authors admit that they “located only one study that investigated whether individual differences in religiousness precede changes in self control” and that study only showed that religious practice preceded changes in agreeableness in women. However, the authors located five longitudinal studies showing that self-control related traits preceded changes in religiousness. Therefore, the evidence supports the conclusion that those who possess self-control are likely to become religious, but it does not support the claim that religiousness causes self-control.

Further, on page 5, they note that “extrinsic motivation for being religious is either negatively correlated or uncorrelated with self-control.” If you become religious because some extrinsic factor influences you (such as that you seek the camaraderie, or you fear God) you are not as likely to have self-control traits. If motivation for participation is not a factor in the health and well-being benefits enjoyed by the practitioners, this tends to support the view that the source of the benefits is something other than promotion of self-control.

There are also deep problems with the way the authors measure self-control. They define it in terms of an intrinsic motivation, and yet they measure it using other traits, such as Agreeableness They argue that this traits “subsume aspects of self-control” because it involves “ the ability to adapt one’s behavior to the wishes and feelings of others.“ (p. 5) “Agreeableness,” then, is an extrinsic motivation, and has little to do with self-control, but serves as the link between the arguments offered by the authors and several of the studies they cite.

In their discussion of religion versus spirituality, the authors note that in their own study, the quality of “Self-Transcendence” (a feeling of spiritual connection to the world) correlates with their religiousness composite scale. (p. 6) They do not mention that the rate of correlation is a higher correlation than any correlation between self-control and religiousness cited in the paper. If self-control is the defining attribute of the religious, we would not expect to find another trait with a better correlation. If there were another trait that was more highly correlated, we would expect an explanation of why that trait is an untenable candidate for the key to understanding the connection between religion and its benefits.

Fishbach et al. (2003) found that the subliminal presentation of temptation/sin-related primes led to faster subsequent recognition of religion-relevant words than did the subliminal presentation of neutral primes. Conversely, subliminal presentation of religion relevant primes led to slower subsequent recognition of temptation/sin-relevant words than did the subliminal presentation of the neutral primes. In the context of the four other experiments, the authors interpreted these results as evidence that people automatically recruit religious concepts to help them exercise self control in the face of temptation and, conversely, that the activation of religious mental content reduces the accessibility of temptation/sin-relevant mental content. Fishbach et al..s study is perhaps the best direct evidence available to date that religious mental content is capable of increasing self-control. (p.

If this is the best evidence of the link between religious mental content and self-control, then the evidence is poor indeed! Whether or not subjects recognize words when primed does not demonstrate that religion has the ability to change the trait of self-control in an individual’s decision making patterns, which would be necessary in order to show a link between self-control and a well-being benefit.

The authors also appeal to a number of intermediate qualities that they assert are related to the acquisition of self-control to shore up their case. They assert that religion promotes goal-making, self-monitoring, and self-regulatory stregnth, and that these qualities contribute to self-control. However, the authors note that not all religions promote goal-making: “For this reason, highly religious Protestant and Catholic Christians set goals about controlling their cognitions that religious Jewish persons evidently do not. (p. 9)” Additionally, the evidence they cite for self-monitoring is weak: “only one of four samples (three U.S., one Iranian) has a positive relationship emerged between religiousness and private self-consciousness.” (p. 12) The authors also acknowledge that the the evidence supporting” the connection between self-regulatory strength and religion “is currently quite thin.” (p. 14)

The authors appeal to fMRI results showing a connection between religious practice and brain activity. They assert that “Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.” (NYTimes) It is indeed the case that these parts of the brain are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion, but those are not their only functions, nor are these functions closely linked to the trait of “self-control” as the authors define it.

Near the end of the paper, the authors mention briefly that “some religious phenomena (e.g., ecstatic or mystical experiences, speaking in tongues, and other religiously normative rituals that involve altered states of consciousness) seem to generate losses of self-control.” (p. 20) Practices involving altered states of consciousness are so universal among religious traditions that it seems highly unlikely that a theory attempting to explain the benefits of religion could so thoroughly exclude them.

The best narrative explanation for the benefits enjoyed by religious practitioners is that religious practice (e.g., prayer, meditation, music) is similar to techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy. These customs and practices have been developed and used over thousands of years and in a wide array of geographical locations, and are incredibly diverse, yet they bear striking resemblance to contemporary techniques that have been shown to be more effective at treating depression than medication.

The trend in psychology is away from a disease model, and towards a well-being model. Psychologists are increasingly interested in ways that research can be used not just to treat problems in mental health, but also in prevention of illness, maintenance of well-being, and fulfillment. This trend is revolutionary in psychology, yet religious practitioners have long known of the benefits of these techniques. Psychologists are only know starting to understand how a disciplined regimen of positive thinking can engender physical changes in the brain that increase health and well-being. Yet religious organizations have long known, appreciated, and exploited the brain’s power over the body through meditation, prayer, yoga, and other practices.