The Advantages of Anthropomorphism

When giving a thing a personality elevates understanding

Here’s an idea I’ve wanted to riff on for a while and is the perfect candidate for this evening under the header of “Ruminations.”

How often do you find yourself relating to a complex phenomenon by way of constructing an internal model that resembles that of a complex personality? Have you ever done this with the weather? With your old car that you have to finesse in just the right manner? Have you ever experienced a mob of people as though it were the embodiment of a greater singular psyche?

Humans have certain faculties by virtue of our evolution. Imagine you could take a Problem A and somehow construe it into a different Problem B such that if you solve B you solve A. Imagine Problem B requires you to find a face, in this case you’d be in luck. I know this sounds ridiculous but it would actually be a great strategy because we have all the internal machinery for identifying faces with great ease. This is why we see faces everywhere, even when they’re not present. It turns out our minds perform this kind of translation all the time without our conscious participation. Mathematicians in particular understand how powerful the method of bridging different analytical realms can be for solving problems.

Humans are really good at more than just finding (plausible) faces. We’re only just beginning to develop the language, intuition, methods, and frameworks for describing what cognition is. My friend Andres has dedicated his life to this pursuit. For the purpose of this rumination I merely want to bring attention to this issue as it ties closely to the issue of how we communicate about our experiences with language.

The main idea here is that if we humans are adept are modeling personalities than we stand to benefit by construing complex phenomena as beings that we can relate to because when we do this we can recruit more of our innate computational resources towards understanding the dynamics of a given phenomena. For example, many cultures have identified and revered a Trickster God throughout history. Whether or not you choose to literally believe in the existence of a trickster god, conceiving of potentially life-threatening sociological dynamics as if they were affected by the interference of a deity may confer cognitive advantages in certain cases.

“Boundary experiences” such as psychedelic ritual and peak experiences coming out of religious practice or charged events like witnessing birth and death are extremely difficult to convey with conventional language. When receiving descriptions of peak experiences from others, we ought to practice a kind of epistemic humility wherein we tolerate radical poetic license. The can feel uncomfortable and somewhat risky as when its done in the wrong spirit, let’s say, it can facilitate the promulgation of Bullshit; however, as human beings within particular cultures, we have access to a kind of limited conceptual matrix. The meaning of our lives that we are capable of communicating with language exists entirely in the relatedness between the concepts we have access to. Most of the time, the only hope I have of understanding you (to the extent we can understanding anyone else’s experience) is to encourage you to describe your experience with the concepts you have access to and then attempt to map your narrative into my own network of understandings.

So the next time someone describes an experience with the Language of Relating - such as “communication” with an unseen “entity” - consider that this language might be appropriate and useful given the manner in which they’ve come to internally model the complexity of the phenomenon to which they were exposed. We can then have a better understanding of their experience and cultivate deeper empathy towards them while suspending judgement with regards to the “literal accuracy” of their narrative.

Ultimately, we will need the assistance of super-intelligent AI to guide the rapid evolution of our language. Until then, we must often suspend judgement of “literal accuracy” altogether as not only do we not possess sufficiently nuanced language we also can’t even imagine let alone execute the experimental protocols that would be necessary to falsify someone’s subjective claims about a peak experience.