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@mcjulie Huh, whereas for me the true underlying meaning is, "Death is a massive Achilles heel for the way our brains have evolved to think about people and personhood," A view inspired by Pascal Boyer's book RELIGION EXPLAINED, by the way. Dunno if you know the book?Permalink On twitter.com
Mood +2 🙂
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@mcjulie The title pisses people off, but it's mainly tying to puzzle out the "cognitive templates" our minds use to deal with people, objects, animals, and how they malfunction. Stuff like misapplying human social models to weather or resource misfortunes...Permalink On twitter.com
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@mcjulie ... or why we model animal behaviours mentally as if they have human motivations and thinking. Boyer argues basically our cognitive templates overlap and glitch because they developed through natural selection. (And death is one place where that glitching is the most extreme.)Permalink On twitter.com
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@mcjulie It is speculative too, of course, but a lot of it really does map well, and as I remember it, Boyer admits that, but also takes care to caveat and not to speculate in a particularly fanciful way.On twitter.com