The marriage of representation and action: towards the processual understanding of religion
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The cognitive science of religion, including its study of religious experiences, has traditionally studied religion as a composite product of two major components: representation (belief) and action (ritual). Such division is also present in the inner divide between traditional cognitivist and newer evolutionary-behavioral approaches. But do we need to view these two categories as separate phenomena that may or may not interact with each other? In the presented paper, I will propose a new theoretic-methodological understanding of religious experiences. The proposed framework is informed by a neurocognitive theory of predictive processing combined with ethological theories of human behavior and, in a broader perspective, by processual approaches to evolutionary biology. I will argue that action and behavior are typological categories describing different aspects of mutually dependent complex processes of information (predictive) and metabolic processing. Importantly, in a processual view, causality on lower levels does not fully determine higher-level emergent phenomena but flows in both bottom-up and top-down ways, posing feedback selective pressures across biological, psychological, and sociocultural levels. Methodologically speaking, I will try to demonstrate how such processual understanding can change how we think about studied phenomena (in my case, religious experience) and design the assumed causal effects with respect to their possible function in larger evolving systems like religion or human culture in general. |
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