Re: Deals

[Chris Crawford <chriscrawford@wave.net>]

> Deals are but
> one kind of manipulation in the universe, they require other communicating
> entities.  "Dealing" with Nature is simply manipulating it, or being
> helplessly subject to its abuses because it is more powerful than yourself.
> No deal with a tidal wave or an asteroid colliding with Earth.  No deal even
> with lighting a fire.  You gather the materials and give it your best shot,
> you succeed or fail.

Interesting that you should phrase it that way. I've been reading about the
early history of religion, and it appears that the earliest animist
religions were, well, "animist", in the sense that the hunter-gatherers
mixed their social intelligence mental modules with their natural history
mental modules, anthropomorphizing all natural phenomenon. This led to the
belief in gods controlling every aspect of the natural universe. In turn,
the social intelligence mental module applied its systems of social
negotiation, leading to the notion of propitiating the gods by means of
various actions. These behavioral systems were developed over tens of
thousands of years, and remain deeply imbedded in our minds. We have
formalized and refined our religious beliefs in the last few thousand years,
but that remains a veneer over some much more solidly anchored behavioral
systems. This doesn't prove anything about storytelling, but it does reveal
something about the cognitive processes of the people listening to the
stories.

Chris