The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [45]
These therapists killed Candace not because they were evil, but because they were in the grip of a pseudoscientific belief grounded in superstition and magical thinking. Hence, an extreme example of the power and the peril of patternicity, and the deadly force of belief-dependent realism.
5
Agenticity
Let us return to our erstwhile hominid on the plains of Africa who hears a rustle in the grass, and the crucial matter of whether the sound represents a dangerous predator or just the wind. This is an important distinction on a number of levels, not the least of which is life or death, but take note that there is another difference: “wind” represents an inanimate force whereas “dangerous predator” indicates an intentional agent. There is a big difference between an inanimate force and an intentional agent. Most animals can make this distinction on the superficial (but vital) life-or-death level, 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 practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. That is, we often impart the patterns we find with agency and intention, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down, instead of bottom-up causal laws and randomness that makes up much of our world.1 Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Combined with our propensity to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.2 And much more. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Extraterrestrial intelligences are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, or the Illuminati. Even the belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Obama being hailed with almost messianic powers as “the one” who will save us.
There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them. In his 2009 book Supersense, University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood documented the growing body of data that demonstrates our tendency not only to infuse patterns with agency and intention, but to also believe that objects, animals, and people contain an essence—something that is at the core of their being that makes them what they are—and that this essence may be transmitted from objects to people, and from people to people. There are evolutionary reasons for this essentialism, rooted in fears about diseases and contagions that contain all-too-natural essences that can be deadly (and hence should be avoided), and thus there was a natural selection for those who avoided deadly diseases by following their instincts about essence avoidance. But we also generalize these essence emotions to both natural and supernatural beings, to any and all objects and people, and to things seen and unseen; we also assume that those seen and unseen objects and people have agency and intention. “Many highly educated and intelligent individuals