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Building the Supernatural: The Cult of Glykon of Abonuteichos From Lucian of Samosata to Cognitive Science

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Research indicates that there is a specially adapted, hard-wired brain circuit, the security motivation system, which evolved to manage potential threats, such as the possibility of contamination or predation. The existence of this system may have important implications for policy-making related to security. The system is sensitive to partial, uncertain cues of potential danger, detection of which activates a persistent, potent motivational state of wariness or anxiety. This state motivates behaviors to probe the potential danger, such as checking, and to correct for it, such as washing. Engagement in these behaviors serves as the terminating feedback for the activation of the system. Because security motivation theory makes predictions about what kinds of stimuli activate security motivation and what conditions terminate it, the theory may have applications both in understanding how policy-makers can best influence others, such as the public, and also in understanding the behavior of policy-makers themselves.
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The projection of human attributes onto non-human domains is often explained in anthropology as the consequence of a tendency to animism-and anthropomorphism present from the earliest stages of cognitive development. However, the experimental evidence suggests that intuitive ontological principles exclude such projections. So anthropomorphism, though widespread, is counter-intuitive. This apparent paradox can be solved by means of a cognitive theory of cultural representations, in which representations are likely to become stable and widespread if they have both salience and inferential potential. Anthropomorphic projections have inferential potential because they activate a powerful modular capacity for mentalistic accounts of behaviour. They are salient because they are counter-intuitive, and therefore attention-grabbing.
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The architecture of the hazard management system underlying precautionary behavior makes functional sense, given the adaptive computational problems it evolved to solve. Many seeming infelicities in its outputs, such as behavior with “apparent lack of rational motivation” or disproportionality, are susceptibilities that derive from the sheer computational difficulty posed by the problem of cost-effectively deploying countermeasures to rare, harmful threats.
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“Acquired culture” depends on social transmission and displays salient cross-cultural variability. It seems unconnected to adaptive fitness. It is, however, constrained by evolved properties of the mind. Recurrent—not necessarily universal—features of acquired culture can be explained by taking into account the early development and constraining power of intuitive ontology, a set of principled domain-specific inferential capacities. These allow us to predict recurrent trends in domains as diverse as folk-psychology, representations of natural kinds, the uses of literacy, the acquisition of scientific beliefs, and even the limiting-case of religious ontologies. In all these domains the notion of cultural transmission along domainspecific cognitive tracks governed by intuitive ontology is supported by independent psychological evidence and provides testable explanations for recurrent features in the anthropological record, [evolution, culture, cultural universal, cognitive development, evolutionary psychology]
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Present conditions and selection pressures are irrelevant to the present design of organisms and do not explain how or why organisms behave adaptively, when they do. To whatever non-chance extent organisms are behaving adaptively, it is 1) because of the operation of underlying adaptations whose present design is the product of selection in the past, and 2) because present conditions resemble past conditions in those specific ways made developmentally and functionally important by the design of those adaptations. All adaptations evolved in response to the repeating elements of past environments, and their structure reflects in detail the recurrent structure of ancestral environments. Even planning mechanisms (such as “consciousness”), which supposedly deal with novel situations, depend on ancestrally shaped categorization processes and are therefore not free of the fast. In fact, the categorization of each new situation into evolutionarily repeating classes involves another kind of adaptation, the emotions, which match specialized modes of organismic operation to evolutionarily recurrent situations. The detailed statistical structure of these iterated systems of events is reflected in the detailed structure of the algorithms that govern emotional state. For this reason, the system of psychological adaptations that comprises each individual meets the present only as a version of the past.
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The authors hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent nonrationality, have what might be termed an epistemic origin--that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal "feeling of knowing" that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system. The authors compare their satiety-signal construct, which they term yedasentience, to various other senses of the feeling of knowing and indicate why OCD-like symptoms would stem from the abnormal absence of such a terminator emotion. In addition, they advance a tentative neuropsychological model to explain its underpinnings. The proposed model integrates many previous disparate observations and concepts about OCD and embeds it within the broader understanding of normal motivation.
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Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This "swamps" working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model.
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R. S. O. Tomlin has recently provided an excellent publication of an amulet found in the City of London in 1989. It is a long, narrow strip cut from a sheet of pewter, with 30 lines of Greek text, and the bearer was a certain Demetri(o)s. By a curious coincidence, two of the Greek inscriptions of Britain also involve a Demetrios, though a different one. They are inscribed on two bronze plates found in York about 1840. One reads , the other , and the bearer is presumably identical with a grammaticus from Tarsus of the same name, described as having come from Britain to Delphi in one of Plutarch's dialogues. This note mainly treats the second of two hexameter oracles incorporated in the text of the London amulet, but I begin by discussing the text as a whole.
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Religious credences which often have their origin in prehistory are deeply rooted in people's minds; beliefs and superstitions manifesting themselves in many ways are usually the last to disappear from daily life. Frequently they survive in a distorted form up to modern times, as anthropologists are well aware.
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This book provides a new description of Mithraism, one of the mystery cults of the Roman Empire, from the perspective of its initiates. Mithraism, which was centred on the sun god Mithras, is described as a complex of symbolic representations created, apprehended, and transmitted not only in the medium of an extraordinarily rich and detailed iconography, but also in ritual action and language, in cult life and hierarchy, and in the design of its sacred space, the mithraeum.
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An old but radical idea in social psychology is that the “person” is not a passive product—of environmental conditioning or genetic abnormality or biochemical factors or unconscious psychic phenomena—but is an active creation of the individual him- or herself (Gergen, 1984). Any approach to understanding and studying social anxiety has to take a position on this issue, since it has a major influence on subsequent model building, research, and therapeutic developments. Clinical psychology and psychiatry have traditionally favored one or other versions of the former paradigm, that people are products of various forces, be it internal or external. However, variants of the latter idea (that people are agents of their own creation [Trower, 1984, 1987]) is now well established in social psychology and becoming an emergent paradigm in the clinical field. For example Heimberg, Dodge, & Becker (1987) list five models of social phobia, all of which are arguably of the latter rather than the former school. Following Goffman’s seminal dramaturgical model (Goffman, 1959), the explicit or implicit theme in these types of models is that individuals are the architects of their own self-presentations, are motivated to present themselves favorably, and social anxiety is a fear of negative evaluation of the self that is likely to follow from predicted failures in self-presentation performances.
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How did our minds evolve? Can evolutionary considerations illuminate the question of the basic architecture of the human mind? These are two of the main questions addressed in Evolution and the Human Mind by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists and archaeologists. The essays focus especially on issues to do with modularity of mind, the evolution and significance of natural language, and the evolution of our capacity for meta-cognition (thought about thought), together with its implications for consciousness. The editors have provided an introduction that lays out the background to the questions which the essays address, and a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in the evolution and nature of the mind.
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