Michael Shermer talks patternicity and agenticity
In the June 2009 edition of Scientific American, well-known skeptic Michael Shermer discusses human tendencies to find things and agency where they don’t actually exist:
Patternicity [is] the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.
Thomas Gilovich conducted a now classic study regarding our tendencies toward patternicity. The subject was the “hot hand” that many people assume that basketball players get. You know . . . give him the ball. He’s got the hot hand going . . .
But we are also a bit too good at inferring agency:
We infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms. Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down.
Why do we claim to see things that don’t exist? Shermer concludes that we are “natural born supernaturalists.”
Agenticity has at least one reasonable evolutionary explanation. Imagine you are a prehistoric human sleeping somewhere in the African wilderness. Amid the darkness of night you hear a twig snap. Your neighbor ignores the sound and continues sleeping, but you suspect that the noise was caused by an unseen agent — for example, a hungry leopard — and so you reach for your spear to protect yourself. The result: your neighbor is more likely than you to become cat food. Thus, evolution favors humans, like you, who can imagine unseen agents. Indeed, not only would evolution favor nervous, superstitious humans, but ones who are *fearful*, perhaps even terrified, of unseen agents. Now, toss in some frightening nightmares about meteorological (i.e., agricultural) calamities, or dead enemies coming back to kill you, or perhaps a deranged neighbor who rants about seeing invisible evildoers, and you have the ingredients for a religion.
I knew it! Since belief in supernatural is all just wish-fulfillment and a hard-wired psychological phenomenon, then why be so hard on those poor theists?
One may say, being theist isn’t so bad as long as they keep it to themselves and don’t meddle in politics and public policy. But the theist’s desire to over exert their brand of truth is also evolutionarily hard-wired.
But then, one may say the skeptics desire combat the evils and irrationality of theism is also evolutionarily hard-wired.
Even my thoughts about this post and what I’m writing is just the natural byproduct of the electronic blips in my brain which are completely uncontrolled by me, since there is no scientific evidence for volition.
I’m a hard naturalist/antisupernaturalist and I say we all leave each other alone (which of course, I’m saying because it’s hard-wired that I do so). How is anyone to win over anyone by reason when we are naturally and evolutionarily predisposed to our own beliefs?
Observable Nature is supreme, who can resist her will?
Michael Shermer at Scientific American: “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-skepticism-reveals