Matt M

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Matt M commented on The Split Brain Theory on June 3, 2009, 2:38 PM

Is there any evidence to suggest that this might be true? Because it sounds utterly ridiculus to me. First of all, the fact that people still claim to hear voices today, regardless of whether people believe them to be crazy or divine, suggests that the human brain has not changed much since the Bible or Q'uran was written. We know that people are able to experience such schizophrenia without having this "god mind" condition that you have described, and I doubt that schizophrenic experiences of the past were very different. While I do believe that so called "divine revelation" is simply a product of the human mind, I don't think that there is any evidence that such delusions were created through a different mecahanism in the past than they are today. Furthermore, in evolutionary terms, examination of the fossil record has shown that the human brain has been evolutionarily stable for tens of thousands of years, long before the texts of our religious traditions were written. The"god brain" hypothesis suggests that the human brain has evolved dramatically in only about 2,500 years since our oldest religious texts were written, which would be astounding.

Matt M commented on Evangelist Fading From the Media on June 3, 2009, 2:25 PM

I think they are defending themselves against science. In the year 2005, there were 17 bills introduced in legislatures accross the United States challenging evolution's place in school curriculums (http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/050927_ID_cases.html), and there have been many since.

Human Behavior and the Maximization of Utility

My idea is that all of our most basic instincts regarding our behavior were selected for because they work to increase some general indicator of our well being, which we can call utility. Thus, I should be able to formulate a model, perhaps using game theory, showing how our behaviors work to maximize utility. Specifically, I am interested in a subset of the choices we make regarding behavior, which would be the set of choices we make regarding how we treat other people; you might call this morality or ethics. In any case, it seems to me that these traits must have been selected for during the early development of our species in order to maximize some indicator of utility, perhaps what biologists call inclusive fitness. I am an economist, so I hope to model these behaviors using game theory or perhaps a maximization with constraints model. … Read More

May 14, 2009 | In

Matt M commented on Re: is dying a bad thing? on December 30, 2008, 12:49 AM

I have to disagree. Though death gives people an incentive to try and live the good life, most of the suffering in this world is caused by death in some fashion. If you were to live forever you may well lose the sense of urgency for seeking certain types of satisfaction, such as wanting to go skydiving or backpacking through Europe before you die; but just because you lost the sense of urgency does not mean that you cannot still do these things. Eternal life would not mean that you couldn't continue to seek satisfaction in your day to day life. Some might say that such a long life would become banal and boring, but surely it would be more exciting than nothing at all!

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