05.23.09

Dreams of a Spirit Seer

Posted in Kant, neuroscience, Science & Religion at 6:48 pm by nemo

Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World
A Skeptic’s take on souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens and other invisible powers that be
By Michael Shermer

As confused as the general public might be on the subject of invisible spirits, it confuses them even more to try and enforce the pretenses of scientism, and reductionism, to the point where dogmatic denial becomes ‘scientific’.
And Shermer raises the question of evolution. But emergent homo sapiens ca 50K BCE onward shew signs of ghostly intimations already, and thus came into being with a sudden sense of the ‘spirit world’, and that was in some sense an evolutionary advance. You could try and argue that it was a regression, but a regression in the middle of an advance seems a contradiction, and unless you think the evolution of man to sapiens level was pointless, but that seems to miss the point. What was the point? Unfortunately, we are the same as then, and don’t know. But we do have intimations that beguile us, and which, despite rapidly succumbing to the processes of false imagination, contain a compelling sense of the unseen.
Actually the perspective of Kant would be more helpful to people here than the massive denials of the devotees of scientism. For, from that perspective, we can at least in priniciple explicate our suspicions that what we see is incomplete: the categories that fret our perceptions include the very framework of space and time. But then the mind that projects space and time must itself stand in a problematical relationship to that space and time, leading us to suspect that it is operating either beyond or else just at the boundary. Boundary of what?
We see how the dilemma is fated to rearise from the simplest consideration of the nature of our consciousness, seen from the perspective explored by Kant, who also provided a cautionary index as to the ‘phantoms’ that we will conceive of in relation to the aspect of our being that is beyond our perceptual limitations, the noumenal aspect of the phenomenal.
We have the reason why some ‘spirit world’ seems to ooze through the strict limits of our perceptual consciousness, which can perceive none of this. But a spontaneous sense of it simply pops into our consciousness, from what source we cannot say.
It is worth considering that Kant’s first critical work, or the first intimation of his critical works, was his book, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, in which he mapped out the realms of metaphysics spawned by the mind confronted with the ‘spirit world’, if such exist. Kant never validated this world, but he was careful not to deny its ‘existence’.

So what is the significance of the fact that man at the dawn of sapienshood became prone to confusions about the ‘spirit world’, a term that is itself indicative of just such confusions, persisting into our present?
We cannot answer the question save to wonder if man’s evolutionary state is incomplete, or limited, or else, well, who knows.
Needless to say the founder of evolutionary theory, now called Darwinism, was well aware of these issues, and became a psychical investigator.
We often remark on the severe incomprehension of many things in animals, yet fail to see that a similar limit to our understanding is present in our species as well.

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as 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.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—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.

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