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NancyLebovitz comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: OrphanWilde 22 March 2013 05:24PM

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Comment author: Kawoomba 23 March 2013 01:29:15PM 6 points [-]

Hew-mons have a long standing tendency to see agency where it does not belong, from hearth gods, to lightning bolts thrown by Zeus, to suspecting a saber tooth behind every rustling tree. That is a priori reason not to assume agency prematurely.

There are conditions (arbitrarily chosen example: prodromal schizophreny ...) that amplify that bias; from hearing voices to seeing hidden messages. While a big (infinite) universe may contain all sorts of curious phenomena, from cosmic planetaria to Hubble volumes in which a deity reigns, the question becomes not "who can list the most agenty hypotheses", but instead "why privilege agenty hypotheses, why be invested in them in the first place", a reason for which has historically been the human psyche.