Comment by munificent
3 hours ago
I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
Enter: the enduring appeal of superheroes.
Notably, entering as our supernatural folk heroes started to fade in the mass communication age.
> ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴅɴ'ᴛ sᴀᴠᴇᴅ ʜɪᴍ?
> "Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
> ɴᴏ
> "Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
> ᴛʜᴇ sᴜɴ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʀɪsᴇɴ
> "Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
> ᴀ ᴍᴇʀᴇ ʙᴀʟʟ ᴏꜰ ꜰʟᴀᴍɪɴɢ ɢᴀs ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɪʟʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
That need is not a cause, it's a reason. The cause is mental variation we have as a species and which is never openly talked about.
I enjoy mythologies and partake in magical thinking. Religion is a tool, you can use on yourself.
I don't mind 3. Two is a bit over the top, I feel. When I was atheist I didn't need such tools or believe everything would fail.
A different data point.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
Is a game of poker magical thinking?
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking": Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist? To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way? Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
But don't you see? My two invisible things with no evidence support each other, giving each other evidence! Hey, what are you doing... put down that razor!