Have You Been HADD Lately?

Religion provides the tribal life style we evolved for (local communities/churches), numbing of nagging questions (about essential absurdity, fundamental uncertainty about what the world is ontologically, and so on), safety in a hierarchy (you know your place, have people you can kick with impunity), and definitively an enemy (the bad) is always provided. ~ Sascha Vongehr 10:10

BREAKING THE SPELL
How Nature deals with the problem of other minds
Daniel C. Dennett, 2006


The first thing we have to understand about human minds as suitable homes for religion is how our minds understand other minds! Everything that moves needs something like a mind, to keep it out of harm's way and help it find the good things; even a lowly clam, which tends to stay in one place, has one of the key features of a mind - a harm-avoiding retreat of its feeding "foot" into its shell when something alarming is detected.  Any vibration or bump is apt to set it off, and probably most of these are harmless, but better safe than sorry is the clam's motto (the free-floating rationale of the clam's alarm system).

"Jason" - the original killer clam rake


More mobile animals have evolved more discriminating methods; in particular, they tend to have the ability to divide detected motion into the banal (the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of the seaweed) and the potentially vital: the "animate motion" (or "biological motion") of another agent, another animal with a mind, who might be a predator, or a prey, or a mate, or a rival conspecific.


This makes economic sense, of course. If you startle at every motion you detect, you'll never find supper, and if you don't startle at the dangerous motions, you'll soon be somebody else's supper. This is another Good Trick, an evolutionary innovation - like eyesight itself, or flight - that is so useful to so many different ways of life that it evolves over and over again in many different species.


Sometimes this Good Trick can be too much of a good thing; then we have what Justin Barrett (2000) calls a hyperactive agent detection device, or HADD.  This overshooting is not restricted to human beings. When your dog leaps up and growls when some snow falls off the eaves with a thud that rouses him from his nap, he is manifesting a "false positive" orienting response triggered by his HADD.