Nick writes: "What is the validator here, and against what is it validated."
Without the possibility of evidence to decide a question, an atheist is one example of a person that will reject it as being invalid. So one thing I'd expect to find in the brain of an atheist is a mechanism to evaluate propositions. Propositions need to be subdivided into smaller propositions until evidence supports them as being true or false. Without evidence a proposition is both true and false, which is uninformative and means to look elsewhere. What makes a person take public positions on this particular thing (no deities) might be little more than personality. An activist mentality, a desire to protect personal preferences from a group rather than the group imposing views on the individual. It's of course possible for a person to pursue self-interest with discretion and without conflict. I suppose these are the folks that sit quietly at meetings intended for brainstorming and at question/answer sessions. Daringly protecting the principle of "Don't look ignorant" at all costs. Working "behind the scenes" in a collegial way, etc. Validation is not a question of beliefs being present or absent without delusion or misrepresentation, it's a question of how active and obvious the resistance is to undecidable propositions. The activism part of it could be the absence of an inhibitory mechanism or the presence of a social behavior. The motivation for a biomarker is that if there is a practiced capability there should be a pattern of connectivity to implement it. In particular, if the topology of that connectivity had a strong hierarchical component to it, then there might be very high level locator neurons that identified weak parts of arguments. For the atheist, one could imagine op-amp like neural circuits to increase sensitivity when coupled to an "authority figure speaking" signal. For the theist, the op-amp could be wired up to memory cells. If a belief was established, the authority figure would further reinforce the memory. If it was weakly established and there was no authority figure signal, then it would tend to zero out. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com