Conceptual Symbionts, Memes and Football

As you might have guessed by now - I hate the word 'memes' - it kicks up all sorts of images and associations with organicity that it shouldn't, so I came up with something better/less confusing/other. Ta-Da:

Conceptual symbionts.

My new and exciting bit of jargon. These little beasties are classified (a) by having no direct physical components, (b) by being a collection of ideas, or closer to the mark by being a sequence of ideas which both lead to and re-inforce eachother, and finally (c) once adopted, become indespensible on a global scale, at least for a period of time.

It must also be noticed that the initial idea in the sequence is one that is already implicit within whatever system it arises from.

I've searched around for a good illustration and come up with football. Not, alas, the American kind, because I don't know enough about it and lack the will to bother aquiring such knowledge, but the British kind. "Soccer". Blasphemy.

Back in the old days football was played very differently. Okay, so there was still the goalie, and 10 other guys dressed in shorts, and a ball, but the way the game was played. Basically, one guy would get the ball and, avoiding countless tackles by the opposing team, dribble it all the way to within shooting range. Then shoot. GOAL !!! Yay, everyone shout hip-hip-hooray.

Passing was very infrequent, done only under extreme duress, and usually backwards to another player who would attempt once again to get into the penalty box all on his lonesome. Basically, though all the players of any given team were nominally on the same side, they didn't really play together. "Team" was spelt with eleven "I"s.

I don't know who 'invented' the "passing game", I'm pretty dumb concerning football history - I blame growing up in a town where the home team was so pathetic no-one except the real anoraks ever supported them - but I think it was the continental teams when leagues started opening up internationally.

Basically three-men cells would run up the pitch and through strategic passing, circumvent any tackles coming their way, get within range and either blast one in directly, or again, lure the goalie into coming out early and pass around him.

They began to win every damn game, flattening the British teams completely. Outrage, this was our damn game..! How dare they, those foreign upstarts, who did they think they were..!



Of course, next season, many of the English teams were playing a passing game, at least the successful teams anyway. The one's that didn't, got relegated, and sank out of sight. After a while, the only teams left, were the ones which passed.

And this encapsulates the idea of a conceptual symbiont:

The first idea: "Pass the ball before you absolutely have to."
leads to: "Have someone ready to recieve it running nearby. Don't run up alone."
leads to: "Have that player run in a strict formation, so you will always already know roughly where to pass the ball, whenever pasing becomes necessary."
leads to, "Have two players in formation, in case one avenue of passing becomes obstructed."

Each idea leads from, supporting and extending, the former.

Then of course, the ideas begin to gloabally expand their effects, because they allow for specialisation. Whereas before each player had to be: A good runner, a good dribbler, a good tackler, a good striker - now with a three man group you could have one great striker, and two (or more) great dribblers to support him - laying the ball off to him after they had brought it to within range.

Midfielders to pick up loose balls, and double as striker-support, defenders to put down attacks - multiple, clearly defined roles, allowing for mutually supportive specialists.

All stemming from a simple initial idea of "pass the damn ball genius."

This is what I mean when I say "Conceptual Symbiont."

Anyway, since we've already got the football, we may as well run with it. Just imagine the football has a religious symbol on it.

Team size. In football, a team's limited to 11, plus a few subs. In life however, you can field as many players as you can get onto the pitch. There's more to it than that though - it's no good having more players if no-one knows which side they're playing for, or in which direction they should be kicking the ball.

The monkeysphere. I know I go on about this a lot, but it is absolutely foundational to any social theory. A.B.S.O. F.U.C.K.I.N.G. L.U.T.E.L.Y.

We're so blasé about meeting strangers these days. We see a dozen a day, and talk to/interact with a couple of them in the course of work/socializing whatever. We think nothing of it.

The only real predator of man left on the planet is man. So why aren't we scared of these everyday strangers..? I mean, imagine there was no law, no over-reaching systems of mutual co-operation - everything you owned, you made; everything you ate, you grew or raised; your water, you lugged up from the well yourself, from the river. The house you live in, the clothes you wear - all of them came from your hands. You do not need anything from another. And they, if they exist (you haven't seen them) shouldn't really need you for anything either. So why would they approach you..? Simple curiousity..? Imagine there's a mountain range between you and some guy you've only ever heard rumours about anyway, would simple curiousity be enough to get you to cross them..?

The only reasons for utterly self-sufficient groups, living in adequately-resourced areas isolate from each other, with no previous history of interaction, to visit one another, are bad ones.

Let me illustrate the situation:

Welcome to blob-land. I want you to imagine a bunch of blobs. They have two states: Sedentary and passive, mobile and aggresive. During their lifetimes, these blobs grow slowly, absorbing nutrients from the area where they lay until one of two things happens:

*Their size goes over a certain value, let's say around 250-300 units.
*They exhaust the nutrients of their locale.

In the first instance, the bloated mother blob splits, and calves off a new blob which promptly switches into mobile-aggressive mode and disappears over the horizon. This new blob doesn't stop until it finds somewhere with enough nutrients to support its growth, where it settles into sedentary mode. If there are no such places left unnoccupied it will attack and either displace another blob, or assimilate it utterly, unless driven off.

In the second case, the whole blob, whatever it's current size, switches into mobile aggressive mode and goes off on the hunt for somewhere new to live.

I think this, barring a little inter-group female raiding/exchange, adequately describes the general state of primitive mankind.

[Remember Game-theory 101..? Remember the initial winning strategy at low pop. density..? "Always default". ie, always attack, and always attack first. And remember, "Always default" is also responsible for keeping the pop. density low, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

Now, we forgot football. Incorporating the above, I want you to imagine that the players in each team are not individuals, but blobs - groups of people about 150-200 - in size. For example - this is a mid-fielder - Hobbes.

He's quite a big lad, isn't he..?

But how is this Hobbesian game played..? Despite the general 'team'ness, there is no team. A player gets the ball, and is tackled. But the player, and the tackler, are largely on their own. It's one-on-one. In fact, the whole global game, despite there being 22 players on the pitch, is only ever one-on-one. In any tackle event, the other 20 players might as well not exist. No-one on either side will help their player/tackler because the target is 'the ball' and personal glory, not so much the overall outcome of the game - and under these conditions - a far better strategy is to wait until either the ball spins free, or to tackle whoever gets the ball, while they are tired from the recent conflict.

Now let's chuck one of the Hobbesian teams off the pitch, and install a passing-game playing continental. The players of this team have decided to sacrifice the personal glory of scoring an individual goal, to the more global joint-glory of 'winning the game'.

Which team wins..? Not a hard calculation. The continentals are playing eleven men against a team of one.

In summary - any conceptual symbiont that increases group cohesion or facillitates trust between unrelated groups - enabling the 'passing game' to be played - will tend to spread via proxy of those who believe. And as a species, we may have undergone coevolution with this emergent function - evolving more developed neurophysiologic 'organs' of belief, and boosting the ability of these beliefs, once formed, toward expression in the kind of consistant behaviour so crucial to mutual trust.

No God Required - Religions Spread Anyway.

One of life's great mysteries to me was how social systems spread from one grouping to another, in particularly ones, like religion, which seem both to do harm as well as good.

In the following post I hope to show how I think it works.

To start off with, here's a poll I conducted a couple of months ago on a philosophy site.

Okaaaay, so not exactly a humongous sample but the best I can do... So - to sum up the results:

Religions have benefit, but also have negative effects.
The benefits are mainly applied within the religion's host society.
The negative effects mainly effect other societies, outside of the host society.

No real shocks there.

Let's draw some pictures.

Okay, so this is some region of the planet [a bit of Spain actually] occupied by six distinct groups. At the moment, all of them are irreligious. The blue circle around the green group signifies their sphere of influence. The greens interact with the two groups on either side.

Now, let's say the greenies become religious. And add some arbitrary units of advantage/disadvantage. Let's take the values from the poll above.

ie. Benefit to believer group of adopting religion = 6
General negative effect of adopting religion = 7

This looks crazy - the net effect of adopting a religion to the host society is a detriment: -1.

However, there is a catch - and it depends on one crucial point. The benefits are applied only within the believer group, whereas the negative effects are applied within the entire sphere of influence.

So - The new situation looks like this:

So, though the effect to the religious group is detrimental, it is offset by the benefit, whereas the groups the believers influence only recieve the negative effect.

ie: Believer group net: -1
Irreligious within range net: -7

Which puts the believer group 6 points ahead overall.

Let's move on, and assume one irreligious group converts, and one does not.

Okay, so the righthand group that didn't convert gets another -7 from the initial religious group without any benefit.

The converted left also gets another -7, (but this time from the cost of adopting religion, rather than the penalty of living close to the initial religious group), and +6 religion benefit.

The initial group gets another -7, +6, as normal.

middle net 6-7+6-7 = -2
left net -7+6-7= -8
right net -7-7 = -14

ie. overall: middle's doing best by miles, left's doing so-so, but right is looking pretty screwed.

Also note the lower groups, now under the sphere of religious influence, starting to take a penalty.

Let's move on again.

Here we start to see another differential - because the two intitial religious groups' spheres of influence overlap, their bonus for being religious also extends to each other, as well as themselves - giving them a double dose.

Now the positive/negative for adopting religion changes to +12, -7, ie. finally, a net positive effect.

Notice that the two lower groups have also converted. And that the lowest group gets a double whammy of -7-7 = -14.

Let's move on one final time.

Now we see a mutally supportive network of religious groups beginning to arise, that will only develop further as more nodes enter the net, and add their bonuses to the total, as their spheres of influence widen to overlap further.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but for what it's worth my conclusion is much like the ones I've already drawn on the other threads:

Religion, once 'discovered', inevitably will spread, regardless of whether or not God actually exists.

From Dope to Pope.

In the place where I was born, there is a magnificent cathedral, one of the most impressive in all of Europe. It's an amazing sight, hard to look at without feeling a sense of awe, and inside you step into the vast collective quiet of hundreds of hushed voices, even the most raucous of tourists cowed into the pretence of respect. The vicars and priests hover in their cassocks, with folded hands and ethereal smiles, just in case anyone has a question, physical or metaphysic.

Even the most hardened of atheists, or agnostics must admit, religion has come a long way.

I mean Jesus, if religion was always just a bunch of bullshit, how did it come to have all this cool stuff..? What happened in the big "SHAZAM!!!" Such a transformation is indeed miraculous, I mean, no other single institution of man throughout history can boast of such a plethora of architecture, riches, pomp and ritual.

One senses divine power.

Or does one..?

Any good detective works from a couple of very basic principles: One of which is the time honoured playground cliché of "Who started it..? and the second of which is "Follow the money". Which is what we will do.

Despite our nice clothes and personal hygene products - we remain what we have always been: curious tool-making apes. If you have kids, you get a million questions a day, "What's that..?", "What's it for..?", "Who made it..?", and of course the ubiquitous "Why..?".

Ever since forever we have been (and still are) used to the things around us being made. So at some point, someone was always going to poke his head out of the furs some cold bright morning, look out of the cave and ask the first big question.

And someone was gonna have to answer, prolly whichever poor bastard was the oldest. Answer A, while being the most honest, is unsatisfying - both to the questioner - who remains none the wiser, and to the answerer, because - let's face it - we old people like to prove we are smarter than you young fuckers.

Answer B, while being right on the money, is massively unnituitive. Having read quite a bit of ancient history I have never found an instance of some ancient race's creation myth being built around "shit just happens".

So, sooner or later, back in the day, some old geezer who'd had enough of feeling like a dumbass probably decided to attempt Answer C. Okay, so he probably didn't come up with the Great Woombah straight off the bat, but probably specified some kind of agent. The actual details don't matter - that an active and necessarily supernatural agent was invented - or seemed just to be "the right answer to give" - because, if you notice, hidden in the question "Who made all this shit..?" is the assumption that this shit is made.

And what is made, demands a maker.

The second most obvious of questions is one prompted not so much by our familliarity with constructed objects but with language. I'm no linguist, but I notice that sometimes the transitions between states - awake to asleep, sane to crazy, are sometimes related using the verbs and prepositions of movement - the same ones we use to say stuff like "He went to the shop" or, "he came back from the library" and "he turned the corner".

Perhaps this doesn't occur in all languages, the Turkish language for "Went crazy" translates as "Deli oldu" - the 'oldu' part being the "became" - ie. "crazy became" - or he "became crazy". Which is actually more realistic. Though they do use the expression 'turned the corner' for a transition from poverty to riches.

Anyway, in English we say - "He went to sleep" although he didn't actually move at all, and "he went crazy" although again, crazy is not a place. And other things, like 'death's door', and 'coming back from the dead'. I hope we've come to an agreement..? If not, I'll turn nasty.

So it's perhaps not too far fetched to say that - just as "who made this..?" implies that X is made - the second most obvious question...

... demands that Mummy has gone somewhere...

You'd have to be one hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch to hit little Tommy with answer A.

Answer B requires a metaphysic bent almost certainly waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond your average paloelithic old geezer.

And so we are left with a variant of answer C. Death as a place to go. Again, the details don't matter. That there is a place, and that Mummy went there - and in such haste indeed that she not only forgot to pack her undies but left her entire fucking body behind too - begs other questions: What went there..? and what kind of place is death..?

But those are questions that don't really matter to the case in hand. Not yet anyway.

So our paleolithic questioner is left with a new place to go, though one which is not really all that practical to visit on a whim, and a new toy - a God (or whatever) which might prove more useful. Afterall - mankind's second most natural urge, after learning the intrinsic properties of something new, is to wonder about how to use it. Sticks get picked up, swished about a bit, and after the essential stickness has been explored, get turned into tools. Leading to question three:

Answer A is not only a conversation ender, it also strikes the questioner as a bit weird - afterall, the answerer has previously specified that God (or whatever) made everything. i. "Huh - this guy makes the sky and the earth and stuff and yet he can't even make a deer wander past the mouth of my cave every morning..? I smell bullshit."

So your smart answerer, perhaps anticipating the questioner's reaction to answer A, and having already gone out on a limb with the whole "God did it" scenario, might do a bit of hedging and come up with something like answer B.

But answer B is still a bit of a disappointment. It also makes the questioner want to explore what the division between "my bullshit" and "things worthy of God's intervention" might be. I mean - let's face it, wholesale catastrophe and suffering were never far away in the old-old days. Sooner or later, something would happen, and the whole tribe would be battering down old-geezer's door asking what kind of a guy this God is, to discount someone's entire family getting run over by an irritated mammoth as "bullshit".

Tricky.

Trouble is, answer C - God as amenable to petition - is a real slippery slope.

"God, pass the salt please."
...
"Hey, c'mon God, Jesus fucking christ, it's just over there, get your ass in gear already."
...
"Hey old geezer !!! OLD GEEZER !!! that god you told me about won't pass me the salt..! Hey!!!"

ie. Disgruntled paleolithic punters.

Okay, so most people didn't have salt-shakers in those days. But that aside, what's Old Geezer gonna say..? After all, if god created the world and everything, proverbially passing the salt should be... er, easy. He's either got to admit - with answer A - that he just made the whole lot up, and suffer the consequences of his protracted deception, or - with answer B - destroy God's credibility, and probably lose his audience. (And let's face it - everyone loves an audience - we are all attention whores). So what does Old Geezer have to invent to preserve god's integrity..?

(a) A scale of things that it's okay to ask god to do for you. And excuses as to why, sometimes, god still doesn't bother even then.

(b) Some reason why god is too busy to do the mundane everyday shit anyway.

Now, poor Old Geezer racks his brain. There are two ways to do (a). One way is to make the things god is willing to do for you so big, that the likelihood of a situation arising in which you actually qualify for God's help is so low that you won't be constantly hanging off poor Old Geezer's ass about why god didn't turn up and do the biz (yet again). Life and death situations are particularly good for this, afterall, when God doesn't save you, you aren't around to complain about it to your local ever-lovin' Old Geezer. Or if you lose a war, then you're too busy being killed/raped/enslaved to ask, and even then, someone will just say "their god was more powerful than ours" to which you'll be obliged to answer "Oh good, so it wasn't that we were just lousy at fighting then."

Smiles all round.

However, that's not quite good enough for life/death scenarios where someone (not in danger) is trying to secure divine intervention for another. The classic sick child that we discussed on the other post. That, for any amateur Old Geezer-cum-theologian trying to back up his new and shiny God-concept, is a real bugger.

Which leads us to the other way to do (a). Ritual.

The making of elaborate, or costly, rituals solves two problems neatly. Number one, when nothing happens, the blame can be shifted from god, to the people doing the ritual.

"You call that a sacrifice bozo..?"
"Nooo - I said draw it facing West you idiot WEST !!!"
I suspect that candle doesn't have real child's blood in it, does it."

Basically, the situation gets messed about until, if the whole divine intervention thing actually does work - then God did it, and if it doesn't - you fucked up. A neat little catch 22.

And number two, if it takes half an hour to even draw the magic circle, you're most likely to walk around the table and pass yourself the salt.

To counter the problem of (b) 'why God seems always too busy to do house calls', Old Geezerwould have had to cook up a varient of one of two answers, very probably depending the social type of the people he's dealing with. If the people are warlike, then God will very probably be busy "fighting off ice giants alongside the spirits of dead warriors" or something, and if the people are more sedentary, then God is more likely to be busy making sure the world keeps ticking over - pushing up the sun every morning, making the crops grow on time, bringing the rain, you know - all respectable Godly pursuits.

It is at this point, with the idea of 'God the tool' successfully absorbed into the group psyche, that the roles of the questioner, and the Old Geezer attempting to answer those questions begin to mutate.

It's also where the second principle of detection come in - Follow the money.

Here perhaps an analogy must be drawn to modern times. The stockbroker or economic expert. To an outsider, the stockmarket is a great big, almost supernaturally complex system, but, alluringly, also one that sometimes produces vast dividends. And who are its high-priests..? You got it. Their speciality is to convince their petitioners (after first convincing themselves) that they know what they are doing. In reality, the stockmarket is pretty much wholly random. A duck on a keyboard buying and selling with the haphazard peck of its beak will - and this must be stressed - in the long run do just as well as any economist with a bunch of degrees, masters and doctorates and a killer, never-fail, Nobel-prize-winning investment system.

Of course, just try telling anyone that. (My advice - don't - just buy them a copy of 'Black Swan' and watch their preconceptions crumble ).

Anyway - The aformentioned Catch22 of "screwing up the ritual" opens up a new niche in the host society - that of the 'expert ritual conductor', the Witch-Doctor - the Priest. In the same way that me 'constantly buying the wrong shares', and yet seeing others all around reaping the rewards of sound investments, will tend to push me into declaring myself an idiot and seeking 'expert' help in the form of an economist - equally, my seeming inability to get God to divinely intervene on my behalf while all around me I hear of, and perhaps even see, other people's children miraculously recovering from the illnesses that killed mine, or harvesting bumper crops while I'm left with a field full of withered, bug-blighted stems... Will lead me to seek an expert in ritual.

And who will I go to first..? You got it - the guy who started all this crap in the first place, the guy with all the answers - Old Geezer.

But this time Old Geezer has a glint in his eye. Afterall, he's an old man, and chasing down gazelle's for dinner is a young-man's work. A man's gotta keep an eye on his pension...

And this is another reason why religious ceremonies seem to have evolved into ever more intricate forms, conducted in strange languages, by weird guys in bizzare costumes inside dedicated structures. It is because once a specialized ritual-conducting-caste takes off, it is in its interest to put the rituals ever further out of the reach of the average petitioner because intervening with God is where their bread and butter comes from.

ie. the more bizzare and complex the ritual, the more costly or time-consuming its accoutrements are to aquire - the less likely the petitioner is to tell Old Geezer where to shove his "Whatever you feel it's worth" up his ass, and go do a little spiritual DIY all on his lonesome.

So, in short, religions - protected and promoted by their handy Catch 22 - mine the deep seams of hope that run through humanity. They are the sacred holding companies, brokering deals with God. So -Duh - Of course they are rich. With or without God. I mean MacDonalds do okay, and nobody believes in the clown, do they..?

Vunerabilities to Conceptual Disease.

Just as our bodies are suceptable to the attacks of germs and viruses, and our computers prone to their cyberspace equivalents, so too are our minds and societies open to infection by conceptual diseases.

Vunerabilities.

1) Cause and Effectitus:

We are very suceptable to 'miracle syndrome' because of an ability unique to humans (and to a lesser degree, the higher animals) the ability to link events occurring within close spacial and/or temporal proximity to each other into webs of cause and effect. We see a flash, then hear a bang, and automatically link them into a sequence - if this, then that - tenuously at first, but more and more firmly with each repetition. Trouble is, because this system is largely subconscious (dopamine neurones) and therefore not reflexively 'rational' it is very prone to being conned. The system also has another glitch, it operates on a sliding scale - in which the number of observed repetitions can be substituted by size of payoff, especially if that payoff is unexpected.

ie: if percieved event X occurs followed closely by event Y, but doesn't actually have any particular direct effect (good or bad) on the perciever, then let's say it will take arbitrarily 50 such observences of the sequence for it to become 'learned'. This kind of situation describes 'background' events and leads to stuff like 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight.' Something useful pretty much only to the herders of sheep.

However, if event A occurs, followed closely by event B, but this time acompanied by direct payoff/detriment C, the learning curve, depending on the size of the effect involved, is cut down to fewer and fewer repetitions. Imagine something stupid, like a clown with a pair of cymbals. He clashes them together, and, undetected by you, his assistant zaps you with 1000 volts, right in the butt. How many times do you think it would take you to form an unconscious aversion to clowns armed with cymbals..?

Imagine some kid on his deathbed. He's a few breaths away from being a corpse. As an absolute last resort, his desperate parents bring in some weird guy plastered in mystic symbols and chanting magic runes. On cue, after the final shazzam, their kid suddenly wakes up, blinks and looks up at them. Miraculously his fever has broken, and the shadow of death has left his eyes. They weep with relief. Weird tattoo-chanting guy falls to his knees and begins to praise god.

How many repetitions would that linkage take to form..? Fifty..?

Ten..?

Five..?

One..?

The important thing to remember is that there is no connection between weird chanty guy and recovered kid. Oh yes there is, you say. Oh no there isn't, I say. Oh yes there is, you say. STFU I say. I know - Because, I've been watching weird chanty guy for some time now. In the last month he's been called round to twenty different houses, containing twenty different dying kids. In each he's done the same silly dance, sung the same damn song, and waved the same little tamborine-thingy full of dried beans. And in each house, every one of those poor kids hacked out their final little breaths and died.

Lots of kids get ill. Lot's more in the past - that scary past where hygene was poor and antibiotics non-existant. And lots of kids died. But some of them lived, er, obviously. And this is the point. Kids do get better. Every year a tiny fraction of kids (and grown-ups too for that matter) even though they are all but kicking down death's door, suddenly get better. All by themselves. Spontaneous remission. Look it up.

But sometimes the event 'get better' co-incides with the event 'Weird magic chanty guy.' And then, the wires get crossed.

I don't know about you, but right now, even though I'm writing this, and try to live fairly squarely in my forebrain, rather than the bit behind it, I can feel my hind-brain niggling. After all the books I've read, and the huge amounts of history that is chiefly connected by the deaths of millions of people who were not saved by supernatural means, a part of me is still saying quietly to itself  "but-but-but that weird-chanty guy must have had something to do with it."

Which leads me onto vunerability 2.

2) Addiction to explanation:

If our minds were simply content with drawing connections between events x and events y, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much trouble. Trouble is though, the fact that 99 times out of 100 there is a connection of some sort between event x and event y is in itself an adaptive force that over the epoches has rooted itself so deeply into our genetic predispositions that we no longer need to actually witness event x to intuit its presence simply by witnessing event y.

Have you ever been just about to drift off into sleep when suddenly you hear a noise somewhere in the house..? It wasn't a 'fridge coming on' kinda noise, neither was it a 'ticking pipe' kinda noise, nor a 'rattling tree-branch' kinda noise either. One of those noises. I hate those noises. They make you lie awake for a while, straining with every sense for its repetition, half hoping to hear it again, half not. And all the while your mind is going crazy, trying out a thousand theories, trying to fit that noise into any one of the thousand holes of noises past stored in your memory, and at the same time hormones are leaking through your muscles, pricking up the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck and making you remember you have that length of steel piping hidden under the bed, just in case...

You have to get up. You have to get up and search for the cause. Any cause will do, however half-arsed it may be, just so long as you can get back to sleep without worrying overmuch that you'll never wake up again.

We're addicted to explanations.

 I love old vampire movies. I vant to drink your blood. Lizten to ze children ov ze night, vat vunderful muzic zey make. Love 'em. When you haven't got streetlights, or streets either for that matter, the night is a scary ole place. Because people sometimes die out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, where the black begins.

One of the irritating things about finding bodies in the morning is that you are left with event y - ie the body - but event x is nowhere in sight. This leaves your hind-brain backtracking through the 'shit that happened yesterday' list until it gets to the last event that ocurred prior to 'finding dead body', which is unfortunately 'it got dark'. There's a huge gap. (But just to be on the safe side, your brain chemistry begins to make you afraid of the dark anyway, however illogical it may be).

You're left with intuited theories like - "When it gets dark, poeple die." or worse, "darkness kills people". Maybe primitive scientist, in light of this budding fear, tests his theory. He gets volunteer 1 to enter darkened hut A to see if the darkness kills him. It doesn't. You'd think this would be a relief, but it isn't. If darkness killed, you could just make sure you always kept the fire burning, a bit of a pain, but no biggie.

So then you're left with "Something in the darkness kills people." Now that's harder to test. Because to test it, you have to go into the darkness. But say primitive scientist has a few brave mates and they all venture off into the dark the next night, albeit with a bunch of flaming torches.

They don't die. Still no relief.

The next night they go out again, but without the torches.

They don't die. Damn.

But hang on, that body was just one body, not a bunch of people. Now the theory becomes "something in the darkness kills people who are own their own..." So, primitive scientist, who, in addition to being brave is also a fucking idiot, goes out the next night into the darkness, all by himself.

They find him in the morning. dead as a doornail.

 Back to square one. And everyone now is too scared to do anything but quivver under their blankets as soon as the sun dips down below the horizon. Which is not good, because sometimes you have to go into the dark. Especially if the neighboring group knows that you guys spend every night quaking under the covers and also that you have some really nice stuff, or a really pretty daughter...

When I was younger, soon after I'd gotten my first job, I suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with, and the freedom to spend it on any old shit I fancied. One of the first things I bought was a good take-down bow, and a bunch of sexy black carbon fibre arrows. I lived in an empty farm house at the time - a renovated old serf's cottage. There was a large field out back, laying fallow. I lugged a couple of hay bales (note - surprisingly heavy for a bunch of dried grass) and set them up, pinning a target to a couple of layers of cardboard and sticking it up to shoot at.

I lost the first arrow I ever shot. Not because I missed, but because the arrow struck the target squarely in the blue ring, and went right through, presumably to bury itself completely in the soil somewhere beyond. I never found it. The arrows btw. were blunt tipped - rounded, and the bow itself was only a 40lb draw target bow, not the heavier 70lb hunting type, and yet, the arrow, from 30m away went through the paper, 3 layers of cardboard, about 2 feet of densely packed straw, and still had enough energy left to bury it's 60cm length in the loose soil.

Interesting fact, if you want to pierce bullet-proof glass, use an arrow.

Imagine you're hungry and tired, hunting at dusk. You hear a noise, and loose an arrow. You hit something. Unfortunately you find some poor bastard leaking from the neck, and no arrow in sight. After fruitlessly scouting around a bit, you decide to scarper back off to your village, and keep stumm. The ground is loamy, and there's a local shower of rain, though it's dried up by the morning, in fact, you'd never have known it had rained at all.

In the morning a body is found, white as a sheet, with two clean holes in its throat, and no blood to be seen anywhere. Scary.

Or imagine that same night. Some guy's drunk as a skunk, weaving his way through the darkness back home. Unfortunately, he runs into the end of a pointy branch, right at throat height. Manages to sever a carotid. Bleeds to death on that same bit of loamy ground, and is washed down by that same shower.

The whole village begins to talk about it. Then dotty old granny remembers a story she heard, ooh way back, happened to a friend of a friend's uncle in the old country. About monsters who sucked the blood of people caught alone in the dark. Holy-moley says everyone - so that's what happened to that first guy, and primitive scientist guy. Oh boy we are so fucked now.

But then granny also remembers that garlic drives them off.

Vampires are bullshit. Along with fairies, werewolves and ghosties and ghoulies of all kinds. But, they are useful bullshit. Because they offer cause. And much more importantly, they offer precautions. Garlic. Wolfsbane, silver, secret signs, chants and ritual movements. The unknown killer in the darkness which cannot be stopped by any means becomes the (falsely) known killer in the darkness, which can. Whip out your garlic necklace and you're safe as houses - wanna go for a walk in the nightime..? Go right ahead.

Nothing has changed. Some people will go out into the dark, and never come back. But the important bit to remember is, the people who know about vampires, will still be able to go out in the dark, whereas the ones who have no explanations at all, not even bullshit ones, won't. And sooner or later, something very mundane, maybe called Fred, armed with a bad attitude, an empty belly and very little food, will come out of the unwatched and unventured-into darkness and kill them for the contents of the pantry.

Any explanation is better than none.

3: Loss Aversion:

I know, I know, you're wondering what the hell loss aversion has got to do with something purely conceptual, having no actual material worth. How can you fear the loss of something not there to begin with..?

Aha.

When I was younger.  :lol: Again. I used to paint. Okay, I wasn't the world's best painter, but equally, I wasn't the worst guy to ever pick up a brush.

One of the most expensive paintings in the world is this one:

The portrait of Dr. Gachet by old one-ear himself. Some half-wit with more money than braincells bought it for 82.5 million dollars.

Now, say one day I was bored, so I painted a picture. For some reason I painted it using the exact same type and amounts of paint that Van Gogh used in painting Dr. Gachet, down to the last milligram. By happenstance, I also use the same colours, in exactly the same overall proportions. The same kind of canvas on the same stretchers. The same kind of brush-strokes. When I'm finished, and the damn paint has dried, I install it in the same frame that currently houses Van Gogh's original pic.

It's not bad. Let's say it ends up a bit like this, but better, obviously.

Tucking the finished painting under my arm, I trot round to Mr. More-Money-Than-Sense's mansion and show him. He says "What's that fucking piece of crap..?" And I ask him why.

The materials.
The materials are the same.
The quality of paint.
It's the same paint.
The brushwork.
It's the same brushwork.
The subject.
Mine's got a guy with a hat and a flower sitting at a table. And look ! Mine's actually got extra stuff in too !!!

So now, poor Mr. Bigbucks is feeling angry. Materially, he's just bought a painting that only cost me about 50 dollars for 82.5 million. So now he starts going on about composition. It's passion. The depth of feeling it invokes in the viewer. The painting's age, it's history and the reputation of Van Gogh himself; the fact that it's one of the most sought after and well known images in the world. He wins of course. In those terms, my painting is a bunch of crap.

But it's important to notice two things. One: those terms are all conceptual terms, you can neither hold them in your hand, nor put them in your pocket. And two: to justify his investment, he was forced to resort to a conceptual defence, otherwise, what was he left with..? A nice picture worth 50 bucks. A real, tangible loss of $82,499,050.oo cents.

How's that for loss aversion..?

Investments don't need to be made in money of course. What's money anyway but crystallized time and effort..? What hurts more in divorce..? Your bwoken widdle heart, or the now worthless years you invested in your marriage, the blood the sweat the tears..? Broken hearts can easily be fixed by 18-year old Swedish exchange students, or alternatively by prozac™. But those years, that energy, they're lost forever.

And so it is with any conceptual property. Once you have it, it aquires value - sometimes simply the warm glow in your heart when you look upon a woman who loves you, and sometimes a real tangible value - especially if your profession is based upon a concept - then that concept is food in your stomach and clothes on your back.

However, that value, being conceptual, is prone to conceptual attack. And if you're a priest then some weirdy beardy guy proclaiming 'god icht dead' might as well be stealing your wallet.

4: Getting fucked out of our heads on dope.

Pretty self explanatory, but often forgotten. Mankind does like it's drugs. I mean fruits practically ferment themselves... Show a man a mushroom, and soon enough he's tripped out of his skull talkin' to the angels. I wasn't exactly a regular on LSD back in my early twenties, but I did take enough to see some weird and wonderful things.

To cut a long story shorter, our brains are only pimped out TVs, hit 'em hard enough and the picture goes all screwy, sometimes permanently. Hell, you don't even have to hit them that hard.

Socially however, in times when nobody studied chemistry and neurobiology, beyond knocking holes in their skulls to let out evil spirits, there would be no solid conceptual platform from which to judge 'real' experiences from 'illusionary' experiences generated through neurochemical imbalance or malfunction, especially if said episode of intoxication were accidental and unintended.

Such things would then form the seed-crystals for incorporation into (fabulous) explainations, as mentioned above.
In conclusion: It's not surprising that, as a species, we believe in so much weird bullshit, we were inevitably always going to.