- #36
arildno
Science Advisor
Homework Helper
Gold Member
Dearly Missed
- 10,123
- 137
Well, roads are social constructions; they wouldn't have been built in the first place unless humans had legs to walk upon them with.hypnagogue said:I'd qualify that a bit: you're talking about the ability/propensity of people to spontaneously experience these things in their usual environments, given their typical behaviors and biological profiles and so on. I think a very hefty chunk of the variance lies not so much in differences in actual ability to have "mystical" kinds of experiences, so much as it lies in differences in the extent to which people find themselves in, or put themselves into, conditions favorable to producing mystical experiences. Most people do not meditate with great discipline, or partake in psychedelics, or have some particular kind of altered-state-inducing epilepsy, or have particular pieces of brain tissue artificially stimulated by neurosurgeons, etc.
Religions are social constructs, and the notion of God as anthropomorphic father figure up in the sky looking down on us is too. However, there is a particular state of consciousness that is closely affiliated with the religious worldview (in the broadest and most general sense of the term). This state of consciousness is indeed "innate" just to the extent that it is capable of being triggered in most or all people by very basic neural mechanisms-- it does not act through the sophisticated level of personal beliefs and propositional knowledge and so on. By way of analogy, probably some majority of the people in the world have never experienced the altered state associated with marijuana; nonetheless, it is the case that this state of consciousness is "innate" to the human condition, to the extent that any human can experience it given the proper low-level neural stimulation.
But saying therefore that the legness of humanity is terribly important to consider in any analysis of the history of road construction is rather far-fetched.
Merely pointing at some possibly biological feature, and then automatically assuming that that feature has been deeply important in the development of some social phenomenon, is a misconception (or at the very least, a wholly inadequate argument).
Last edited: