It was actually Immortalist who wrote that. But I think it's clear
the answer is that we evolved an ability to intuit the mental
states of other people, and then we projected this onto the
environment.
[...]
So the precise instinct I'm proposing is we interacted with other
people in the environment in a way that forced us to model
their mental states to ourselves. Compulsive socialization
causes people to invent all kinds of things.

Patriot Games wrote:

"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1166576468.741592.301180@73g2000cwn.googlegroups.com...

What would have been the evolutionary precursor for that instinctual
behavior?

Over-active "agency detection systems" which result in attributions to
patterned movements. Say a few twigs in a bush hint an outline of an
animal. Those who made these mistakes survived.

So, pre-humans thought they saw God in a pile of leaves and that thought
was
powerful enough to be encoded into our DNA???

The idea is that those with traits promoting "jumping to conclusions"
and "making wagers acted upon" lived and the others died, therefore we
feel good when we suppose gods.

A new theory of....

Patriot Games wrote:

"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1166576468.741592.301180@73g2000cwn.googlegroups.com...

What would have been the evolutionary precursor for that instinctual
behavior?

Over-active "agency detection systems" which result in attributions to
patterned movements. Say a few twigs in a bush hint an outline of an
animal. Those who made these mistakes survived.

So, pre-humans thought they saw God in a pile of leaves and that thought was
powerful enough to be encoded into our DNA???

The idea is that those with traits promoting "jumping to conclusions"
and "making wagers acted upon" lived and the others died, therefore we
feel good when we suppose gods. THose who attributed animal agency to
peculiar auditory and visual patterns, lived, others died or got their
gene frequencies much reduced by the ignorance of potential agents and
their religious like gambal.

A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT),
proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably
biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were
asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory explains known
phenomena such as men's overperception of women's sexual intent, and it
predicts new biases in social inference such as women's underestimation
of men's commitment.

Buss comments on Error Management Theory. In an uncertain world, two
potential errors in thinking: a. partner having affair (but isn't) b.
partner isn't having affair (but is) The cost of making those two
errors are very different. Those making the first error have less cost
(from a reproductive success standpoint) than those who make the
second. Theoretically we evolved toward vigilance and are more likely
to make adaptive error. Explains why men and women sometimes have
delusions that a partner is unfaithful or might be. "It's not paranoia
if they're really out to get you!"

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2002/pr020103.cfm

Error Management Theory

Humans live in an uncertain world. We rely on our senses to pick up
information from the world, and then use our information processing
capacities to make inferences about the true state of the world. Real
threats to our survival and relationships are not always readily
apparent, given the ambiguity and uncertainty of the information.

Consider a relatively simple problem of walking through the woods and
fleetingly sensing a slithering object scurry underneath some leaves in
the path directly in front of you. There are two possible states of
reality: either there is a dangerous snake in your path or there is not
a dangerous snake in your path. Given the incomplete and uncertain
information that you have percieved, there are also two inferences you
could make. There is indeed a dangerous snake, and you act to avoid it.
Or you could conclude that there is no snake and continue walking down
the path.

There are also two possible ways that you could be wrong. You could
believe that there is a snake when in fact no snake exists. Or you
could believe that no snake when in fact a venomous rattler is lurking
right in your path. The costs of these two types of errors, however,
are vastly different. In the first case, your belief causes you to
incur the trivial metabolic cost of taking an unnecessary evasive
action. By giving a wide birth to the area that you believe harbors a
snake, you have merely gone out of your way a little, incurring a minor
delay in your walk. In the second case, however, failing to detect a
snake that is in fact lurking in your path can cost you your life. THe
two ways of being wrong carry substantially different costs.

Now imagine that this scenario not only repeats itself thousands and
thousands of times in your liftime, but billions and billions of times
over human evolutionary history. Those who made the first kind of
mistake tended to survive, whereas those who made the second kind of
mistake tended to die. As a result, modern humans have descended from a
line of ancestors whose inferences about the uncertain world erred in
the direction of believing that snakes existed more than they do. These
can be called adaptive errors.

Consider uncertainty about whether your romantic partner is having an
affair or is likely to have an affair.... Continued on page 76 The
Dangerous Passion - Why jealousy is necessary as love and sex - David M
Buss

The Dangerous Passion:
Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex
by David M. Buss
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684850818/

It is, rather, that evolution has
equipped us (or most of us) with certain proclivities or dispositions
to explain misfortune, gain scarce social goods, and act morally (by
which Boyer means, roughly, acting in such a way as evolutionarily to
benefit either ourselves or the tribe).

Is Boyer in touch with the folks over at the Human Genome Project? Because
they should be looking for his Belief Gene(s).

Yes, and if we find these nerve groups, we probably find the parts of
the brain which performs mediate and immidieate inference and hence
logical structures mammals have inborn.

THE PROBABILITY INSTINCT

It looks as if Kant, who thought our minds structure our perceptions,
was right. Probability was built into our minds. Our minds, the
electrochemical symphony that our narrowly evolved neural ganglia play,
impose an infrastructure on our thinking. The mind imposes a background
of time and space and causal connectedness. Scientists have never seen
a "causality" in the wild. They have seen, and they predict, only
space-time events that follow space-time events. Apples on the tree,
then apples in the air, then apples on the ground. Equations and
correlations have replaced causes, just as science has largely replaced
philosophy and religion as a theory of things. No causal germ in one
event unfolds into another event. But the mind, as eighteenth-century
philosopher David Hume observed, makes it seem so and inserts the
causal links in the event chain.

Probability seems to be part of the same mental infrastructure. It
forms part of our mental background or viewing screen along with time
and space and causality and similarity and the topological notions of
continuity and connectedness. We see probability everywhere because it
lies in our glasses.

I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or
Jungian archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our
perceptions and memories and most of all our expectations. Probability
gives structure to our competing causal predictions about how the
future will unfold in the next instant or day or season or millennium.

Probability ranks or weights the future alternatives. Our expectations
then blend or average these future alternatives into a single
probability-weighted average. The probability weights do not exist
outside our minds. They have no physical reality but have a powerful
psychological reality rooted in our neural mi-crostructure. Hume also
thought that we make up probability as we go and use it to fill in gaps
in our mind schemes or world views: "Though there be no such thing as
chance in the world, our ignorance of the real cause of any event has
the same influence on the understanding and begets a like species of
belief."

This probability instinct seems to cut across cultures and may cut
across species. Besides the probability-laden psychology of scientists
and most nonscientists, the widespread gambling and games of chance in
primitive and modern cultures suggest that probability "reasoning" may
be a cultural constant like hero worship or fertility rituals or incest
and adultery taboos. A cultural constant suggests a biological
substrate, and that requires an evolutionary history.

Ranking future alternatives can help pass on genes. Those who could so
rank may have eaten those who could not. It allows us to bet before we
act and improve the outcome of acting. That forward-looking ability has
supreme survival value in biological evolution, the genetic variation
and selection in the last few million years that has finely sculpted
our brains and minds, and in the prior evolution that sculpted the
brains and minds of our mammalian ancestors in the last 220 million
years. Natural selection filters out organisms as they cross the fuzzy
line from the present to the future. Natural selection favors brain
mechanisms that help an organism make its next move in a changing and
dangerous world. These forward-looking brain mechanisms may run deep in
the structure of mammalian and even reptilian brains. Future studies
may find that the brains of chimps and apes and lesser-brained mammals
house a forward-looking probability instinct. At the other extreme we
should not be surprised that scientists have exalted probability
ranking into their grand organizing principle of maximum probability.
Scientists follow their probability instincts as their hominid
forefathers followed theirs. Scientists just know more math.

Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
Bart Kosko
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/078688021X/