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Geese flying in formation: a simple swarm intelligence phenomenon |
In a
fast-moving malware landscape, commonly used programs often need quick patches
(code snippets) to close newly discovered vulnerabilities and keep them
useable.
Let us suppose that humans are like that. Let us suppose the existence of something real behind belief in God: a human swarm intelligence that is slow-moving and poorly accessible to consciousness. This swarm intelligence would be a product of natural selection and [the rest of this paragraph is conjecture] talks to us in a language of emotions. It tracks slow changes in the environment while the conscious mind tracks the fast ones. The two environment trackers communicate via a frequency band centered on one reciprocal week. This is also the dividing line between the bands processed by the two trackers.
The week does not correspond to any astrophysical cycle; it is an invention (discovery?) of religion.
What were you doing last weekend? Don’t remember,
huh? You don’t need to; God will calculate.
Arguably, the slow swarm intelligence will occasionally fall behind in tracking especially rapid environmental change (e.g., global warming), show evidence of a weak spot in its frequency response, and need to be patched. At least until natural selection catches up. Logically, this same natural selection should by now have come up with a solution: A proclivity of humans to self-organize into some patch-applying sub-process. This would be organized religion, of course.
The last
patch applied to human nature seems to have been a package of five patches: the
Pillars of Islam. Before that, we received two big patches at once: Jesus’ “Love God” and “Love thy neighbor.”
However, we
now live in a world that would have been inconceivable to the 12 disciples and
the early followers of Mohammed, and collectively we are facing unprecedented
existential threats. Is it time for another patch?
I say yes, two in fact, and the needed patches may be:
“Love Thy
Planet,”
and
“Do Not
Divide the People.”
The first
of these precepts is already addressed by a recently-added fifth Mark of
Mission of the Anglican church and a sixth Mark of Mission that speaks to the second patch was accepted on principle, then folded into the fourth Mark of Mission. The proposed patches are also echoed in the Anglican Baptism Covenant. Many other people have
obviously been thinking along the same lines as myself. The new “commandments”
will have to be presented and received as the voice of God to be effective, and
I will not here tell organized religion how to do its job.
However, does organized religion itself need a patch? It seems to suffer from a lack of flexibility.
Since there
is little time, we cannot wait millennia to accumulate enough testing of new
precepts in the crucible of life to confidently promote them to commandments
from God. Thus, we must aggregate such human experience across space instead of time,
using the Internet. Luckily, there are now about 5.5 billion of us able to participate, which
should ensure a very high-powered study. Since this would essentially be an
experiment on humans, the internet could also be used to collect the ethically required written, informed consents. See also this site before planning any studies. The observational study type is recommended at this time (2025). These two sites are geared to medicine, which frequently deals with life-or-death situations, which is appropriate, because so does religion.
The above reasoning argues against atheism but not for the status quo. Is panreligionism the only way to ensure that you have all the latest patches? Oligoreligionism may be more practical. Are the parts of a religion severable and transportable to another religion, or must they all work together synergistically as a system? Are some severable and others not?
However, the ideal human swarm intelligence will be a function of the details of the problems of existence we face, and these details will be a function of geographical variables like latitude, altitude, and distance from the ocean. Even with the same details, different populations will need different patches because of historical factors, such as the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA they have.
Top photo by Nancy Hughes on Unsplash
