Cognitive Operators and Belief

July 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

D’Aquili and Laughlin (1979), give a cognitive explanation for the universality of myths, rituals, and ‘religious’ practices, citing three processes which the mind engages in, and which have identifiable cortical correlates. These innate and non-conscious forms of thinking, conceptualisation, abstraction, and binary thinking, are used by all humans to make sense of the world, to ‘organise unexplained external stimuli into some coherent cognitive matrix’ (1979: p.161). This idea is developed further in Newberg and D’Aquili (2002), which names eight of these ‘cognitive operators’ underpinning the organisation of psychological experience. This work further proposes a mechanism for how the functioning of these cognitive operators leads to mystical and religious belief.

This research suggests that all humans are universally determined to find explanations and produce ‘theories’ about the structure and operation of the world in which they are lodged and to invest these theories with belief. There is no evidence, however, of a cognitive operator, or any other cortical or cognitive structure, which corresponds to the protocols of rational sceptical science. This is presumably for good adaptive reasons: humans would be likely to evolve mental processes which organise experience in a way which optimises survival of the body, but the parsimoniousness required by evolution would not allow the kind of objective rigour that scientific process demands. Embodied cognition will tend to produce heuristics rather than laws.

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