Jane Galt talks about the not-so Bright Daniel Dennett (who I think is brilliant in many ways, but certainly not this one). He really does seem clueless about human nature, and the need for belief systems.

When done well, religious teaching instills a moral compass that stays with even the most obnoxious of humans. I believe without this compass you have 8 old rapist and 13 year old murderers. When the average human believes it’s just me and my needs that are the only important consideration, there is no stopping point in what is permissible. Short of gunning them down what is a society to do with such people. I’m open to any secular solution that can be proven to work but I deify you to name one that has worked. I’m not saying that there haven’t been religious atrocities, but on the whole it does far more good than bad.

I believe without this compass you have 8 old rapist and 13 year old murderers.

Somehow Soviet Union managed to avoid that.

Arguing against the belief that beliefs are necessarily fundamental to the human condition is probably relatively pointless, well at least many seem to think that Dennett is stupid for doing so, but there are higher callings so here goes.

To me at any rate Dennett actually seemed quite clued up on the nature of belief systems, he continually alluded to their evolutionary nature through out the article. Particularly the nature of religions to like bacteria eventually evolve down certain paths – symbiosis, innocuousness and extreme high mutation short lived more virulent forms that eventually destroy the hand they feed on, and thereby themselves, etcetera.

As Dennett well knows, (he has written a number of academic papers in this area), the human brain is not fundamentally based on belief, as many pop evolutionary phycologists now seem to think. The brain is generally accepted as a neural network that recognises patterns within our perceptions. Now of course a binary, (Boolean true/false belief), computer can simulate a neural network and a neural network can simulate a binary computer, (if memory serves Turing proved this?), but to use a really fancy neural network like our brains which have something like 10,000-100,000 connections per neuron to simulate a binary algorithm which only requires two outputs per neuron, true/false, is like buying an oil tanker just to fill up the lawn mower on Sundays. Yes the human brain is capable of belief, and there are some evolutionary successful scenarios where doing so is viable and in some cases this has even been selected for, but our scientific understanding of such things tells us that true/false beliefs are not the fundamental architecture of our thinking. History also tells us that our individual neural networks are obviously adaptable with regard to beliefs.

Somehow Soviet Union managed to avoid that.

They had a religion too -- it just worshiped Marx, Lenin and Stalin instead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

They had a religion too -- it just worshiped Marx, Lenin and Stalin instead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And if the 5 Year Plan ever met its target it was a miracle.

This sounds like an extreme version of the Ph.D. problem: people who have achieved expertise in one field somehow come to believe they are universal experts. Dennett knows a lot about computing and information theory, but that still means he knows precisely as much as any random customer in a Target store about religion and its role in human civilization.