CCC Land Grab

[Matrix]

Its kind of weird that beings OF PURE MAGIC <or, well, of minerals imbued with pure magic that makes them sentient> are temperamentally mundane... i like the aesthetic tension there.

Some interesting thoughts here. So they're essentially apatheistic? I also like the seeming contradiction that they are highly magical creatures who don't really care so much about it...because they were designed to find it normal.

I will tell you a secret. That never actually occurred to me. I think I just see the concept of spirituality differently from all of you, because when I think of it, I think of gods, demons, angels, and other such supernatural beings. I don't think of magic as spiritual, unless it's directly connected to such beings, like a divine spellcaster in D&D. I also don't think of art as spiritual, either. Mental, sure. But then, the mental is a subset of the material.

Also, your mention of apatheism is interesting, because I myself an am apatheist on most days. The way I was thinking it, they're not even that. The idea of supernatural things just completely doesn't occur to them. They are completely incapable of understanding a supernatural viewpoint. They will find some other way to explain it, like "Legend is history gone awry". I hope this explains it better. Kinda rushed right now because I have to go to school. If you're still confused, maybe I can try again on the weekend when I have more time.

[Torco]

the mental is a subset of the material.

This is what us materialists believe, yes. But its certainly weird for a sentient being to have a predisposition to agree with a particular philosophy from our 20th century. That's like a soviet conworlder saying, I don't know, that a particular race of aliens is -at a core, pre-cultural level that has to do with its basest phychology, mind you- temperamentally unsuited for trotskysm and favours leninism. Or a 17th century chistian coming up with a conpeople whose soul is inherently given to arrive at the proper truths of calvinism

i mean... mundane-oriented? sure. typically unimaginative and not given to giving natural phenomena agentive explanations, like humans? sure, love it, why not. temperamentally uninclined towards strange entelequies like a "transcendent being" ? sure, awesome.

UNABLE to comprehend "supernatural" explanations? unable? i mean, they'd have to be pretty stupid to not be able to understand something as simple as "a wizard did it", which is basically what supernatural being type explanations are
<note: i'm not arguing, i think i know what you mean... but then again i'm not totally sure about it: either you mean that these guys are sort of hard-wired into functional naturalism or that they're rather incompatible with abrahamic gods in particular, and you're just commiting the very common sin of confusing "religion" and "spirituality" with judislamtianist formal theology. I mean, at the limit, Zeus is just a big burly bloke who lives on a hill and throws abundant balls of lightning around when he's not boning whatever he can, man woman or goat.. surely that's something they're able to comprehend!

[clawgrip]

In order to be something more than programmed robots, they need at least some ability to abstract and infer in order to understand basic cause and effect. When a golem hears golem-style footsteps behind it, it can recognize basic cause and effect and infer that there is a golem approaching from behind. When it has been night a long time it can infer that day is coming soon. When golems hear legends, as you say, they can infer that it is history gone awry. Since they are an intelligent species, they should have a fairly developed ability to make inferences and predict things that they cannot sense directly. The question is, why does the ability to infer stop when it comes to the spiritual? What makes them unable to infer even the possibility of a divine creator? Too little evidence for them to have ever bothered to think about it? I mean, they have themselves and the world around them as the effect, so to speak, so why do they not consider the cause? Programmed predisposition against imagining where they came from? Or something else? I am not criticising here, just trying to get a handle on what motivates these people.

[CatDoom]

Human beings seem to be psychologically hard-wired to think about just about everything in terms of human relationships and interactions, which makes sense given that we're arguably the most intensely social animals on the planet. Maybe golems just don't anthropomorphise things that way. When humans confront things they can't control, like a sickness or a storm or an earthquake, we tend to want to figure out not just why or how these things came to be, but also *who* is responsible, which leads us to imagine spiritual beings with abilities beyond our understanding. Maybe golems just don't anthropomorphise natural forces and abstract concepts the way we do.

Of course, that doesn't mean that golems would be immune to magical thinking. Unless they've got some sort of formal logic built into their magical brains, they could probably still confuse correlation with causation and become convinced that certain words, objects, rituals, and the like give them some control over things which they have no mundane means of influencing.

Furthermore, it seems like philosophy could easily become something of a preoccupation with golems. Even without religion, they have a pretty concrete reason to believe that they were created by some outside agency for some specific purpose, and trying to figure out what that purpose was could be a central question of their existence. I could see them developing something along the lines of classical Greek, Indian, or Chinese philosophy, emphasizing personal enlightenment, an understanding of the nature of the universe, or the creation of a harmonious society over veneration of supernatural beings, but with a healthy dose of mysticism mixed in.

[clawgrip]

If that is true, then it's not really spiritualism they can't comprehend, i.e. a belief about why they exist and some attempt to infer the cause, it's just that they don't assign causes necessarily to gods or spirits or whatever. But even though they don't conceive of there being any kind of invisible, anthropomorphic creator, they may still have wacky beliefs based on misinterpretation of correlation vs. causation. They can be very superstitious, but without a middleman, e.g. they could believe something like "If you kill a snake at night it will cause an earthquake" because that happened once and they guessed that was the most convincing explanation, but they would never take the next, more human step, i.e. "If you kill a snake at night the snake god will punish you with an earthquake."

[Matrix]

you mean that these guys are sort of hard-wired into functional naturalism

When humans confront things they can't control, like a sickness or a storm or an earthquake, we tend to want to figure out not just why or how these things came to be, but also *who* is responsible, which leads us to imagine spiritual beings with abilities beyond our understanding. Maybe golems just don't anthropomorphise natural forces and abstract concepts the way we do.

Looking at these Wikipedia articles: naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, I think that it's a combination of hard-wiring for metaphysical naturalism and a lack of hard-wiring for anthropomorphization. (or maybe even hard-wiring for the avoidance of anthropomorphization - interesting to me, because right now I'm working with the idea that the Mecongai language doesn't have subjects)

Of course, hard wiring for metaphysical naturalism...

they could probably still confuse correlation with causation and become convinced that certain words, objects, rituals, and the like give them some control over things which they have no mundane means of influencing.

...doesn't mean that they are perfect logicians.

[Torco]

If that is true, then it's not really spiritualism they can't comprehend, i.e. a belief about why they exist and some attempt to infer the cause

How very american, clawgrip

[clawgrip]

What do you mean? Did I get too carried away with the whole inference thing?

[Torco]

not at all, its just... the equating of spirituality with the belief that some supernatural being created the world is kind of parochial: its like if a hindu wrote "spirituality, i.e. the concern for reencarnation"

[vec]

If its OK, I'd like to claim C-10 for some water-lovin' golems.

[clawgrip]

not at all, its just... the equating of spirituality with the belief that some supernatural being created the world is kind of parochial: its like if a hindu wrote "spirituality, i.e. the concern for reencarnation"

I will admit my comment was too narrow there.

[Torco]

happens to the best of us

[Salmoneus]

If that is true, then it's not really spiritualism they can't comprehend, i.e. a belief about why they exist and some attempt to infer the cause, it's just that they don't assign causes necessarily to gods or spirits or whatever. But even though they don't conceive of there being any kind of invisible, anthropomorphic creator, they may still have wacky beliefs based on misinterpretation of correlation vs. causation. They can be very superstitious, but without a middleman, e.g. they could believe something like "If you kill a snake at night it will cause an earthquake" because that happened once and they guessed that was the most convincing explanation, but they would never take the next, more human step, i.e. "If you kill a snake at night the snake god will punish you with an earthquake."

Of course, the irony here is that the belief in the snake god is a far better explanation.

Once you've worked out that killing a snake at night will cause an earthquake, the next step is to work out what causes that causation: why does killing snakes at night cause earthquakes?

Clearly, given the complete lack of overt connection between snake-killing and earth-quaking, "it just does" is a pretty bad explanation here. "There is an entity that can cause earthquakes and does not like the killing of snakes" is a far, far better explanation (it may also help explain other bad things that happen when you kill snakes, or times when you can kill snakes at night without causing an earthquake, and it also opens up the idea of there being other powerful entities that explain other seemingly bizarre causation patterns). [And if an entity dislikes things and responds with violent actions, it sounds pretty anthropomorphic, or at least pretty animalistic. And if it has a particular affection for snakes, 'snake god' isn't a bad description of it]

So I guess the golems must have a sort of anti-science chip in their head that just shuts off their thinking when they try to analyse cause and effect any further than proximal causation?

In which case, I think these golems would be extremely 'spiritual': they would have a legalistic, ritualistic religion filled with prohibitions and commandments (from a combination of observed correlations and 'programming'), all of which appears to them entirely arbitrary and meaningless. Over time, given the unavailability of rationalism, they may resort to empirical testing of some of their beliefs, and develop science - but then again, when it comes to thing like earthquakes, you don't want to run a test, in case you're wrong! In general, I think they'd be extremely conservative - if any random thing might cause an earthquake or a volcanic erruption or a meteor strike, you don't try a lot of new things just in case...

[ol bofosh]

The idea that the golems are compulsive in their behaviour and they're incapable of introspection, imagination and abstract thought is sticking.

They are incapable of viewing the world in terms of intention (a "god" made it). Perhaps they percieve the intentions of other sapient species as simply mechanical "cause and effect" with no psychological depth? The ultimate behaviourists? (no depth psychology here, thank you) Perhaps they have no intention of their own? A bit like animals, but with "instinctive" patterns that drive them to build complex architecture and make complex art and other products of culture?

Well, this isn't supposed to be philosophy, it's fiction, so I'll just let it slide.

Edit: maybe I should be looking into cognitive psychology, and not just thinking in terms of depth psychology and behaviourism.

edit2: it can be further differentiated from humanistic psychology.

edit3: On balance they will favour cognition: "Cognition is the process by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used."
More than personalism: "One of the main points of interest of personalism is human subjectivity or self-consciousness, experienced in a person's own acts and inner happenings—in "everything in the human being that is internal, whereby each human being is an eye witness of its own self"."
And any process of cognition will be connected with obvious sources of "information management" (i.e. brains, computers, etc.) rather than disembodied or diffuse (i.e. gods).
Am I getting warm?

[Matrix]

I don't think you're getting warm - I don't think Sal is either. I think that my previously posted explanation is sufficient, is it not?

[Torco]

I don't think you're failing to express the concept you have in your head: rather, I think that concept, which you seem to be more or less satisfactorily expressing, is what we're finding wanting. from what I read your thing is "their head is just not fertile ground for god-ideas to thrive". and we get that. but how come is what's problematic. i mean, god-type explanations, as me and Salmoneus keep pointing out, are not so special. they don't have a particular set of mental processes that they use that other ideas don't. There's nothing special about saying "maybe there's someone doing this thing". and then "maybe i should make sure that guy likes me" and then "i failed at that thing, maybe i should try and convince the guy responsible for that thing to let me succeed at it next time" <aka prayer> and from there to "dude, stop doing that, the powerful guy is not going to like it and i'll have to pay the consequences so stop it" <religiously inspired oppression of those different from yourself> and so on.

Ignostically enough I'd like to mention that the ambiguity of the word "god" is partly to blame here: "god" may mean anything from a transcendent omniscient immaterial three-people-and-one-at-the-same-time so-real-its-not-even-real entity that's beyond time and space and reality and whatnot to a much more modest wizard, ghost or superhero. This ambiguity means that since there's nothing really so special about gods, other than being imaginary people, not being able to come up with them or even comprehend them means that these people would be incredibly retarded, since they'd not be able to imagine imaginary people: so, for example, you could show them again and again a cellphone, even call them on the cellphone, and they'd go " BEEP BOOP WHAT ODD SOUNDS THIS MACHINE PRODUCES... THEY ALMOST SOUND LIKE THEY'RE CHANNELING THE VOICE OF A PERSON THAT ISN'T HERE BUT THAT'D BE SILLY AND RELIGIOUS BEEP BOOP I CAN SEE HOW INFERIOR CREATURES MIGHT BE TEMPTED TO RESPOND TO THE PSEUDO-VOICE INSIDE THEM, BUT NOT ME WHO IS CLEAN OF MIND AND NATURALLY ATHEISTIC BEEP BOOP " or something.

[ol bofosh]

The closest I can get is that golems have a "natural predisposition" to locate cognition/intention/personality in physical objects like brains and computers rather than locating them in disembodied or diffuse concepts, like the gods.

A couple of questions:
How would they react to a group of people praying to "Our Father, who art in Heaven"?

If a disembodied entity did interfere with them in a purposeful way, leaving clues of, but not revealing, their presense (that any intelligent being could pick up on), would a golem eventually cotton on, or would they just be confused wondering why "random events" seem so intent on being consistent?

[Salmoneus]

The closest I can get is that golems have a "natural predisposition" to locate cognition/intention/personality in physical objects like brains and computers rather than locating them in disembodied or diffuse concepts, like the gods.

A couple of questions:
How would they react to a group of people praying to "Our Father, who art in Heaven"?

If a disembodied entity did interfere with them in a purposeful way, leaving clues of, but not revealing, their presense (that any intelligent being could pick up on), would a golem eventually cotton on, or would they just be confused wondering why "random events" seem so intent on being consistent?

That, though, presupposes an unproblematic definition of 'disembodiment'. Gods are often considered to have bodies: those bodies might be, for instance:
a) a mountain
b) the entire natural world
c) a very big person who lives a long way away.


Anyway, I think there are two different routes to problems here:
i) gods (etc) explain otherwise inexplicable correlations (both correctly and incorrectly posited correlations). Without the possibility of the divine, these things remain inexplicable, terrifying, and constricting
ii) the leap from the observation of physical behaviour to the existence of an intentional force is exactly the same leap that allows people to believe that other people are real and that they matter, and that they are not merely robots/zombies/etc. If you can't ever believe that the spirit of the mountain is causing the landslide, how can you believe that the spirit of the neighbour is causing the hand to wave? And likewise, if you can't ever believe that it is wrong to offend the spirit of the mountain, how can you believe it's wrong to offend the spirit of your neighbour? A culture of people who each believe themselves to be the only real person in a world full of soulless mechanisms it was impossible to hurt is possible, but would probably not be very pleasant...

[In the long term, of course, the animist approach gets undermined by scientific progress, which provides more coherent and understandable causative processes that remove a lot of the need for animism, while at the same time pointing out key differences between, say, brains and piles of rock, encouraging us to see brain-havers and non-brain-havers as fundamentally different. But that all doesn't come until a lot later on in history]

[ol bofosh]

That, though, presupposes an unproblematic definition of 'disembodiment'. Gods are often considered to have bodies: those bodies might be, for instance:
a) a mountain
b) the entire natural world
c) a very big person who lives a long way away.

Quite right. But I didn't want to know about embodied gods. Yet.

edit:
okay, third question:
The desert of your golem culture is endowed with sapience. It never directly communicates with the golems but it some things of its behaviour show clear signs of intelligence (dunes spontaneously organising themselves into complex geometric patterns, for example). Is this something the golems would realise or understand?

[zompist]

Separating "spiritual cognition" from "regular cognition" does seem a bit problematic. Here's a few ideas though...

* They have trouble imagining things they have no direct experience with. The Piraha are (reportedly) like this-- they lost interest in Jesus once they were told that no one alive had met him. (Which didn't mean that they didn't believe in spirits. They did, but they said that they could see them.)

* They are not very social, and thus don't have the primate adaptation to understanding the world in terms of personalities.

* They have trouble believing that anything but golems are sapient. That is, they don't golemomorphize well.

* They lack the sense of wonder that humans seem to have.

Another approach would be to say that they're just not very curious, as they don't have the neotenous mental flexibility of humans... but that's my orcs.

[Matrix]

A couple of questions:
How would they react to a group of people praying to "Our Father, who art in Heaven"?

I think they would ask where this Heaven place is, and how this Father can hear them if he's somewhere else.

The desert of your golem culture is endowed with sapience. It never directly communicates with the golems but it some things of its behaviour show clear signs of intelligence (dunes spontaneously organising themselves into complex geometric patterns, for example). Is this something the golems would realise or understand?

I think that they would understand such clear signs of intelligence.

[Torco]

wait... what? so they're not especially religious but they'd think that something is a god if it only draws geometric forms?
god of magnetism indeed... or of mathematics, which is full of neat patterns like that. also don't dunes already make geometric shapes ?

[Matrix]

Not a god. Nowhere in that question did Bofosh say that the desert intelligence was a god, and nowhere in my answer did I say so, either. They would recognize the spontaneous organization of complex geometric patterns as being done by some kind of intelligence. That does not mean that they would regard it as a god. They would probably try to communicate with it and/or otherwise figure it out, and if that failed, ignore it unless it posed some kind of threat.

[ol bofosh]

I think that Matrix's answers and Zompist's suggestions make it fairly clear what we're dealing with now.

And I'm guessing that if golems can figure out that a desert is intelligent, they could also figure out an intelligence is interfering with them in the case of a disembodied or diffuse entity, though they may have difficulty understanding its source. They wouldn't regard such things as "gods" even if they were. Feelings of reverence towards a "greater being" must be quite alien to them. Though I bet that if a "god" told them to follow the rules of Leviticus (what they can, anyway) or they'll be destroyed, they would follow the rules. There hearts still wouldn't be in it, there's be no devotion. It would just be another contract.

Since there is no fixed spiritual/divine aspect to this conworld, this means that golems won't participate with the religious activities of other species or be the source of their own.

[Torco]

That gives me an idea: how about they can imagine intelligences with ease, and some of them do anthropomorfize... *but* they just don't venerate, they don't worship, they don't feel the need to be in servile awe of these great others. Maybe that feeling is strictly reserved for the ancients. It makes sense, I mean, if I make a golem I want it to be sycophantic, obedient, servile, worshipful and so on and so forth towards me, not towards something someone convinced the guy existed.

in other words, they're so well made to be servile that they can't worship. I think that kind of closes the gap, since the only difference between deciding the desert has an intelligence and deciding that there's a desert god is the attitude the subject takes: in one case, a jinni or something like that, its just a guy, probably evil even: in the second, you hope that by sucking up to him he will give you favours.