ATHEISM IS FOR THE BRIGHT AND THE INFORMED

That’s why old-fashioned religious people and their holy books warn their children to be dumb and godly rather than smart and ungodly. Of course, whether or not one is smart enough to understand science and also to be very reasonable is entirely up to the genes. Intelligence is completely genetic. No one can take credit for her IQ factor one way or another. Now a fundamentalist of any religion can have raw intelligence which he does not feed with knowledge (that’s ignorance), and for ignorance he can and ought to be held responsible, specially if his ignorance is holding back the progress of the entire human race.

Recently, several facts about intelligence and autism are coming together for me that make real sense:

• Raw intelligence is rising as the human animal deals with its increasingly complex culture. By the way, intelligence has nothing to do with literacy which seems to be declining.

• The rate of autism is increasing in the human species.

• There is a statistically significant correlation between those whose brains are mathematically inclined and pattern seeking, thus scientifically inclined, and the increased rate at which their children are autistic.

• Autistic children are more likely to understand the world around them through logic rather than through intuition. They have a hard time understanding metaphors, and they can’t very easily read the emotions in people’s faces. Thus, the world you and I live in is foreign and frightening to them.

• Most autistic children that I read about, being rational and less emotional rather than irrational and very emotional, are atheists.

I conclude that as the human animal’s raw intelligence increases there will be more autistic sports, that is autistic children. They are genetic accidents thrown out by the mating of ever more intelligent human animals. The question is are these sports likely to survive? Or just how logically adept and emotionally muted can an animal become and still survive? Will this be beneficial for the human species or not? Will atheism just naturally increase as raw intelligence increases? Many questions….

I am reading a book called, The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night, by Mark Haddon, which brings all those questions into focus for me. It’s a mystery told through the eyes of a very bright, autistic teenager who is both socially inept and scientifically precocious. He understands almost everything by logical problem solving and is thrown into fits when he’s overloaded with human interaction or too much information or someone touches him. He’s also an atheist, not by choice but by nature, as you’ll see, if you read the book.

To experience this novel is to experience what it might be like in several centuries for almost all humans to be alive, logical and not too intuitive. It all depends just how adaptive are the autistic genes. As I’ve said several times on this blog, I’m pretty sure that I’m just a robot who thinks that he thinks, in short, a functioning computer. The following passages from Haddon’s book illustrates what I’m talking about. The narrator is the autistic Christopher Boone, and, I think, if you read the entire book and if you are honest and very logical, you’ll see that your brain works pretty much like Christopher’s brain works, only a little more intuitively.


163 [Christopher’s chapters are numbered according to prime numbers.]

When I was little and I first went to school [a special school for autistic children, I think], my main teacher was called Julie, because Siobhan hadn't started working at the school then. She only started working at the school when I was twelve.

And one day Julie sat down at a desk next to me and put a tube of Smarties on the desk, and she said, "Christopher, what do you think is in here?"

And I said, "Smarties."

Then she took the top off the Smarties tube and turned it upside down and a little red pencil came out and she laughed and I said, "It's not Smarties, it's a pencil."

Then she put the little red pencil back inside the Smarties tube and put the top back on.

Then she said, "If your mummy came in now and you asked her what was inside the Smarties tube, what do you think she would say?" because I used to call Mother Mummy then, not Mother.

And I said, "A pencil."

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. But I don't find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.

It's like computers. People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.

But the mind is just a complicated machine.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. [And there isn’t a little person in his head either.] We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

And you can tell this because of an experiment which I saw on TV in a series called How the Mind Works. And in this experiment you put your head in a clamp and you look at a page of writing on a screen. And it looks like a normal page of writing and nothing is changing. But after a while, as your eye moves round the page, you realize that something is very strange because when you try to read a bit of the page you've read before it's different.

And this is because when your eye flicks from one point to another you don't see anything at all and you're blind. And the flicks are called saccades. Because if you saw everything when your eye flicked from one point to another you'd feel giddy. And in the experiment there is a sensor which tells when your eye is flicking from one place to another, and when it's doing this it changes some of the words on the page in a place where you're not looking.

But you don't notice that you're blind during saccades because your brain fills in the screen in your head to make it seem like you're looking out of the little windows in your head. And you don't notice that words have changed on another part of the page because your mind fills in a picture of things you're not looking at at that moment.

And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work something out.

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months. And it has a picture of all the stitches in its leg and the broken bone and the pins and even if it sees a bus it has to catch it doesn't run because it has a picture in its head of the bones crunching together and the stitches breaking and even more pain.

And that is why people think that computers don't have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means a little man. And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn't see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.

And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.

Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.

167