Robert Wright's The Evolution Of God

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After going through many brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines, there has been a development in the discussions of Darwin and the Buddha. Robert Wright explores the question of whether the early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? Wright has written extensively on the topic of religion, particularly in his latest book The Evolution of God. In 2009. When Wright was asked by Bill Moyers if God is a mere delusion of the human imagination, Wright responds: "I would say so. Now, I don't think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about God have evolved people have moved closer to something that may be the truth …show more content…
Very early on, apparently people started imagining sources of causality….that even today a Buddhist monk would say were valid forms of apprehension of the divine or something.” The mind of a human being is designed to often delude them about themselves and about the world, Wright argued. Although people have this illusion in mind, Wright believes it may be something that people had made up, confirming that people did not start life with a blank slate, established after the cognitive revolution. For examples stories that would help them control the world even if they way they have designed life has made happiness hard to sustain. This idea was also discussed in the 2nd lecture and onward. In this class we went over the two systems in our mind. System 1 interprets information quickly, and makes intuitive decisions, while system 2 gives the mind to process the information with more analysis, and come up with a conclusion. System 1 is universal across the human species and shared with non-human animals. System 2 is variable across cultures, but is not innate. and is species specific. The subject of Cognitive Psychology also supports many of these phenomena, with the belief that there is no central direction in our minds that controls our behavior, but the very actions are “directed” by many combination of signals within certain modules of the
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