Simulation, Science, and Stakeholders: Challenges and Opportunities for Modelling Solutions to Societal Problems

The article outlines an approach to computer modelling called “human simulation,” whose development has been explicitly oriented towards addressing societal problems through transdisciplinary efforts involving stakeholders, change agents, policy professionals, subject matter experts, and computer scientists. It describes the steps involved in the creation and exploration of the “insight space” of policy-oriented artificial societies, which include both analysing societal problems and designing societal solutions. A case study is provided, based on an (ongoing) research project studying “emotional contagion” related to misinformation, stigma, and anxiety in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with lessons learned about some of the challenges and opportunities facing scientists and stakeholders trying to simulate solutions to complex societal problems.publishedVersio

A Germ of Tranquil Atheism

This article playfully inverts the theme of this special issue, exploring the relationship between the birth of "Christ" and the death of "Christianity." Its title is borrowed from a phrase found in the writing of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who suggests that Christianity contains "a germ of tranquil atheism." The first section highlights the significance of "the event" of Christianity for Deleuze, which has almost nothing to do with Jesus' death and almost everything to do with the secretion of atheism. Section two explains how Deleuze's critique of the repressive and oppressive mechanisms of Christianity (the poster child for the Despotic machine) and of the symbol of Christ (the poster child for the White Face) can be complemented and strengthened by insights from the bio-cultural sciences of religion. Like all religious assemblages held together by shared belief in imagined punitive gods, Christianity, along with its obsession with the religious Figure of Christ, will eventually die. Can we be worthy of that event: the death of Christianity, whose timely demise, ironically, is hurried along by that "germ of tranquil atheism" that it could not help but secrete

How to Survive the Anthropocene: Adaptive Atheism and the Evolution of Homo deiparensis

Published version of an article from the journal: Religions. Also available from the publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel6020724Why is it so easy to ignore the ecological and economic crises of the Anthropocene? This article unveils some of the religious biases whose covert operation facilitates the repression or rejection of warnings about the consequences of extreme climate change and excessive capitalist consumption. The evolved defaults that are most relevant for our purposes here have to do with mental credulity toward religious content (beliefs about supernatural agents) and with social congruity in religious contexts (behaviors shaped by supernatural rituals). Learning how to contest these phylogenetically inherited and culturally fortified biases may be a necessary condition for adapting to and altering our current natural and social environments in ways that will enhance the chances for the survival (and flourishing) of Homo sapiens and other sentient species. I outline a conceptual framework, derived from empirical findings and theoretical developments in the bio-cultural sciences of religion, which can help clarify why and how gods are imaginatively conceived and nurtured by ritually engaged believers. Finally, I discuss the role that "adaptive atheism" might play in responding to the crises of the Anthropocene

Human Simulation and Sustainability: Ontological, Epistemological, and Ethical Reflections

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Human Simulation and Sustainability : Ontological, Epistemological, and Ethical Reflections

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Modeling the effects of religious belief and affiliation on prosociality

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Minding morality : ethical artificial societies for public policy modeling

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Minding Morality: Ethical Artificial Societies for Public Policy Modeling

Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally salient dimensions of a culture is critically important for producing relevant and accurate evaluations of social policy when using multi-agent artificial intelligence models and simulations