Thread by @then_there_was

Reading Sapiens.

I have a feeling humanity's transition from forager to agriculture farming was captured by the Biblical story of Adam and Eve being cast out from the Garden of Eden.

Man's knowledge of farming transformed his life into a state of backbreaking labor.

Life was easier as a forager—less of a burden.

It's a beautiful story actually.

Reading the Bible is really unlike other types of reading.

There's this underlying pattern that seems to applies many different domains.

I didn't get the same feeling after reading the Quran.

The Bible feels like it somehow managed to capture and compress millions of experiences into a story.

A story is similar to a path.

Beginning and ends. Ups and downs.

I believe stories are an adaptation of biological and cognitive processing abilities originally meant for walking up and down a path, like a road up a mountain.

Stories take advantage of preexisting infrastructure designed for something else entirely: Walking.

To me, the Bible seems to be a kind of code meant to modify the neural structures we used to navigate the physical world.

The "programming language" is a story.

A story grabs on to the dura mater of our brain and irrevocably changes us, modifies us, like a pleasant virus.

Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins seem to have underestimate the ability of information to evolve, like genes.

What survived was that which could propagate itself amongst individuals successfully.

Reading the Bible probably boosts reproductive success and lifespans.

Because writing is static though, you quickly run into a problem:

It's unable to adapt itself to stimuli.

I think preachers probably serve as "compilers" or "interpreters" that can modify and update the text.

I wonder what cognitive "gadgets" the Bible gave to humans.

Culture, mental models, and cognitive gadgets are all different words for the same thing to me.

They're software programs for the brain.

The Bible is an operating system.