Episode 235: Animated Objects

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I had to sit down with Jay-Z and tell him Snoop was the most famous rapper ever. What'd he say? He agreed. He did? Not really. The Queen in Oz has spoken! My brains and you have. Anybody can have a brain. Very Bad Men. I'm a very good man.

[00:01:18] Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, today we're going to break down a definitive argument for the existence of supernatural spirits. What form is your apology to me going to take?

[00:01:33] Are you going to be public, are you just going to do it in private, or have you thought about that? I really was feeling so strongly that the apology was going to go the other way. I don't know what to say.

[00:01:46] I feel like the spirits of the trees and mountains should be compelling you to do the right thing here. I talked to this tree in my yard on my way here about how to handle that.

[00:02:00] I got some sage advice, but people will have to wait until the second segment. That's right. So in the first segment? Get it? Sage advice? Oh! It wasn't intentional. It's more after the fact. And sage doesn't grow on trees. Does that push it? I don't think so.

[00:02:22] I don't think any herbs or spices grow on tree. I don't know. We're going to get a lot of, actually, cumin comes from the... All right. But before that we're going to do an opening segment that we had already recorded and that

[00:02:40] we had to preempt because of the Will Smith news that was the opening segment from last time. And the irony was by the time we actually released that episode on Will Smith, nobody gave a shit. Nobody turned? Zero people gave a shit. It was over.

[00:02:59] These fucking news cycles, man. We got to switch to being a weekly podcast to catch some of this stuff. I know. Anyway, so yeah, let's get to that. It's on dehumanization, forgiveness and revenge. Did we even say...

[00:03:14] Did we make clear that the reason we're back here is because the podcast started here nearly 10 years ago? Yeah. I know it was a lost. But I'm sure you remember that that was part of... We got invited back for that reason.

[00:03:28] Not that we just happened to be in Costa Rica again. No, no, no. Right. Yes. I don't know if we made that clear. Yeah. I thought it was important. Yeah. We were invited back. It is a little weird... You can cut this if you want.

[00:03:40] It is a little weird being invited to something like this because the people are very generous and they cover most of our expenses, but there are other people around us who are filthy rich and it just kind of feel like I don't belong. I definitely do.

[00:03:55] I get very uncomfortable around super rich people, but having said that, like I'm sure Ditaro had some problems with Catherine the Great, but he was happy to get free trips to Russia. That's right. We're not hubris stick at all. You know what, Tamler? I forgive them.

[00:04:17] I forgive the rich people. Well in any case we're very grateful. Yeah, so what do we have to talk about today? You missed my segue. Completely went over your head. Wait, so it's 80... But you know what Tamler? I forgive them. I forgive the rich people. I see. Yeah.

[00:04:39] I don't know if that was so obvious. That was pretty subtle, especially after having some bourbon. No, that's right because the paper isn't literally entitled the role of forgiveness. Well, it's not literally. It's literally subtitled. A subtitle is literally a kind of title.

[00:04:55] Well, this is further research and investigation. Sharif 1961. I'm just going to say Sharif 1961 after any claim I make from now on. I think that's Lawrence of Arabia, Sharif 1961. I will put that in the last one. Alright. Rehumanizing the self after victimization, the roles of forgiveness for revenge.

[00:05:21] That's a paper we're going to talk about in this opening segment. I want to shout out... Shit, and I had it up a second ago and then I lost it. It's from Chemtrop. He gave us this idea. He said, here's a study for a very bad wizard.

[00:05:33] Science now says revenge is bad. Tamler and peas, your move. And pointed us to this paper. Which do you want to describe it since you're the psychologist here? Sure. Okay. So this is a paper by Shuman and Walton. I know Greg. Sorry, Gregory. Sorry for what's to come.

[00:05:56] Yeah. So the paper does a few studies testing the hypothesis that forgiving people who transgress against you is superior to revenge in as much as it makes you more humanized. So the claim goes, when you're transgressed against, like when Tamler says, root shit to me.

[00:06:16] Which I never do. Which he always does. I feel less of a person. Right? Like I feel dehumanized by his treatment of me. I could either get back at him. So you started putting more pins in voodoo? Yeah. We're not there yet. We're not there yet.

[00:06:33] We're not there yet. I could get back at him. You know, I could start a blood feud that will for generations to come to pit the Pizarras against the Summers. Our two daughters. Our two daughters. It's just a fight to the death right now. They are currently.

[00:06:51] As we speak. Or I could forgive him. And so the claim is that if I forgive, I get some of that humanity back because presumably the act of forgiveness requires actions, traits that are uniquely human like a sort of a moral sense that is more human.

[00:07:09] It's associated with humans. It's associated with humans? Yeah. And so for studies to try to demonstrate this. I just have a couple questions just about the setup and about like the construct of humanness, especially when we're regarding yourself. Yeah.

[00:07:25] Like so I know studies of dehumanization of others where you feel like people dehumanize the Jews and the Holocaust people dehumanize people of you know, darker skin often. And that's that's had some tragic and terrible results. But what is this idea of perceived self humanists?

[00:07:49] Is that a thing? Is that really a thing? I alright. So cards on the table. I have a problem with even the concept of dehumanization. And I don't know if we've talked about it before, but to me dehumanization. Yeah, we have I think so with Paul.

[00:08:04] Yeah, with Paul. It's like a it's a metaphor. You know, sure people describe like the Jews as a vermin. Like that's true. That's true. But whoopee. But yeah. But but the claim like the real deep claim that we actually perceive these people to

[00:08:20] not be human seems to go rather against a lot of things. Right. And I think as Paul pointed out in one of his articles, you attribute guilt and agency to people like you, you, you say, Oh, the Jews were greedy or they harmed, you know, they harmed me.

[00:08:38] Those are very human things to do. Right. Like they can't my dog is greedy. But you know, presumably you blame them less because to the extent that they have agency, maybe you blame them more. But but there is a lot of attribution of agency that justifies mistreating

[00:08:54] people as like one of the scales is that shows humans at various stages of evolution, right from like pure apes all the way to like upright walking human beings. Like it's like treated as a scale of like literally you think that these people are less involved.

[00:09:09] They're not homo sapiens. And I don't think that that's I think there are a lot of problems with that whole literature. But on top of that, as you point out is one thing to say that we don't see other people as human.

[00:09:20] It's yet another thing to say that you don't see yourself as human here is where it just strains credulity where it's like look like if what you want to say is that you feel bad about yourself or you feel like

[00:09:31] you were out of control, you feel hurt, you feel like emotional. Maybe those things are associated more with being less agentic. But who the fuck doesn't see themselves as human? Right. Like just the fact that you're thinking about this stuff at all is

[00:09:47] is like the testament to the fact that you are a member of the homo sapiens species. I guess in both cases, but especially in this case, is this supposed to be metaphorical in a way that is helpful? Like is the metaphor somewhat helpful?

[00:10:06] And I just don't see how like especially with this, I think the idea is so when they describe this participants described a variety of powerful dehumanized sentiments in response to being harmed. One participant reported feeling treated as though I was were a

[00:10:21] toy rather than a human being when her boyfriend tried to pressure her into having sex. Like clearly that's a metaphor, that's analogous, right? It's not some generalized state of mind. It's very specific to the offense that you're reacting against.

[00:10:37] It's not like she then goes around thinking I'm a Lego, right? Do you remember that R. Kelly soggy remind me of my Jeep? I wanna ride you. He's just gonna sing this whole time because we're in the studio.

[00:10:53] The interesting claim is a very specific narrow one that in fact you are treating people as if they are not homo sapiens. The broader claim that you are attributing characteristics or even using metaphors, you are like a pig because you're greedy. Have I dehumanized you?

[00:11:10] I mean, I don't know. But again, it's like yourself though is the thing that I'm like in regards to this. But let's even say like this is another problem. So this is I think a deep problem with the way that this is even conceptualized for other people.

[00:11:23] Like if you say Michael Jordan took flight like a bird, technically it ought to on the theory that Brock Bastion and these people have presented ought to mean that you have dehumanized Michael Jordan. And I think it's just being the concept of humanization is being abused.

[00:11:39] What people are trying to study, I think they say they're studying dehumanization. They're treating people poorly. And in this case, it's even worse. It's you feeling like shit. So let me just read their overall description of the present research.

[00:11:55] In the current article we examined the agency of victims to reduce their feelings of dehumanization following an offense by either forgiving their perpetrator or taking revenge against them. We predicted that victims who forgive will feel more rehumanized. It's like they've been dehydrated.

[00:12:10] They've been dehydrated and added some water. Exactly. They'll feel, ooh I feel more human. Man that was good forgiveness. Man. Look I'm standing up straighter. I'm not climbing on trees anymore. You know. Then those who take revenge at least in part because they

[00:12:29] feel that their act of forgiveness is consistent with moral values that are fundamental to being human. I think it's literally just this. When you forgive you're doing a good moral thing and I don't think animals can do good moral things.

[00:12:42] I don't think that when they show the measures though, some of this stuff it's not just that. Yeah well there's a bait and switch I think. Okay so here is a measure developed by Bastion and colleagues 2013 where participants rate themselves on four items assessing qualities that are often

[00:13:00] seen as fundamental to being human and that distinguish people from machines and objects. So no sometimes. It's not animals it's machines and objects. No sometimes like the dehumanization literature is about not being animalistic and sometimes it's about not being machine like and those actually are

[00:13:17] different very different ways. Yeah so this is like maybe like used as a means rather than an ending itself so you should be on board with this. Well let's see I'll read the measure. This is a seven point scale I believe.

[00:13:32] I felt like I was open minded like I could think clearly about things like that's a measure of human. That's a measure of so many things. Like if I'm hazy because I've been drinking, I'm not. You're not human you're a machine. You're looking you're giving off machine minds.

[00:13:52] Number two ways in which I can measure humanists. Quote I felt that I was emotional like I was responsive and warm which by the way is cardinal sin of measurement here. I was emotional comma like I was responsive and warm

[00:14:08] is one item and that's three things like that's. I felt that I was emotional is arguably a like I'm angry. Yeah what do I say to that. Yeah yeah I thought you were going to defend this but I was going to answer. I will.

[00:14:26] Quote third one I felt like I was mechanical and cold like a robot this is a I mean that one is pretty straight forward. It's baseball. I felt superficial like I had no depth. That's just weird. What is that? That's weird.

[00:14:42] Well how could you interpret that you're on mechanical torque which by the way they were or at least in some of this stuff or prolific maybe. No I think it was mechanical torque. Yeah but they just both but I don't remember which one

[00:14:52] but yeah like that's one where you're just like I mean like I'm getting paid like five bucks for this or whatever. I felt superficial and then like I have no clarify like you had no depth in case you had any questions about what that might mean.

[00:15:08] Yeah it's not like two dimensional or just is a machine deep or not like I mean shallow like is it right you know yeah I call deep learning for reasons it's not called shallow superficial learning and what if I

[00:15:22] have lost some weight as you know like I am not as deep as I used to be. That was terrible. Okay then there's four items assessing qualities that are seen as features that distinguish humans from animals. This is a subscale. I felt like I was refined and cultured.

[00:15:39] Like I guess animals can't be refined and cultured but it's not clear to me that that's. I would I feel that almost all the time. I felt like I was I felt like I was rational and logical like I was intelligent.

[00:15:55] Now is that supposed to be dehumanizing or humanizing? It's supposed to be in this you point to the thing I was saying earlier in this subscale it's supposed to be humanizing because compared to animals we're rational. Right but when you put it in the right machine

[00:16:11] subscale rational and logical is not human so which is it? This is just terrible this is terrible measures. I feel like an effective altruist. I felt like I lacked self restraint comma like an animal. What? So is that like how do you interpret that like there's

[00:16:33] two different kinds of not feeling self restraint or lacking self restraint. There's one which is like a human one that that's an animal or is it like only animals lack self restraint because I would argue that animals and humans are about the same when it comes to self

[00:16:49] restraint. Absolutely like you know my dog is trained very well to wait for his treat right like he actually exercises a whole lot of self restraint. Tamler is already drank a glass of whiskey without even thinking about it. There is a conceptual theoretical conceptual crisis in sociological.

[00:17:10] I've been waiting to hear you like say that this is the dehumanization of literature just brings this shit out in me too because it's just terrible. I didn't even know we were going to talk about this scale to some because there are so many other things.

[00:17:23] Yeah, that's right. I just wanted people to get a real sense of what's being measured because the voodoo doll one makes this look like a fucking you know. Yeah, like physics. Yeah. I felt like I was unsophisticated reverse score. All right. Like you know fancy cats not notwithstanding

[00:17:42] participants. Yeah, indicated the response in some point skills. So that's that's what you did. You either feel dehumanized or you're like a red cat according to me. That's right. So so in this in this one people just were told like remember a time that you felt like somebody

[00:17:59] committed an offense against you and now fill out this this scale and then now tell us whether you forgave them or whether you saw revenge and then and then they fill out it. I mean this is a boring objection but what they're asking is like remember some time

[00:18:15] where you somebody wronged you what did you do and how did you feel that they could be this could be like five years ago. Yeah, how did you feel and now you're filling out that scale that that you just read like the idea that that's

[00:18:29] the meaningful measure of like how it really is when you really forgive or take revenge in this first study in like weirdly so they measure the self-humanity right after you said whether you were a friend like her so so remember Tamela or time where you

[00:18:46] hurt got it remember that okay how do you feel like two minutes ago. Right. How do you feel you felt the self humanity scale and now did you seek for revenge or forgiveness and now fill out the self humanity scale again. What?

[00:18:59] Yeah, I didn't catch that and it turns out I'm pretty sure and it turns out that seeking revenge raises your self-humanity also like forgiveness and like both of them raise your sense of self-humanity. Well they say that in the Yeah, it's in the graph.

[00:19:17] But also it's not taking revenge it's remembering about having taken revenge or remembering about having forgiveness raises on this meaningful scale like a couple points or something like that. That's right. But either way like just so just you know if you want to just

[00:19:33] boost your humanist just think of an offense that was committed against you and then just think of how you responded you're guaranteed to get a little bit of a boost. Right. Even if you took revenge, you know. Right. Yeah, that's right.

[00:19:47] Just I don't need to think about past times to feel human. I feel like I can just look at my arms and legs. You're taking that too literally. Okay. So can we talk about the voodoo doll? Well yeah let's can we just go

[00:20:03] through study too because this is an offensive defense. Yeah. Like we held constantly offense and participants response by asking participants to imagine an offense when somebody treated them with lack of respect or dignity the highest proportion of offenses were committed by coworkers. These typically involve disparaging

[00:20:24] behaviors such as being criticized criticized yelled at or having one suggestions ignored participants indicated that this treatment made them feel quote insignificant and like I didn't mean a day drawing on these reports we asked participants to imagine having been ostracized or criticized by a coer oh so there

[00:20:44] was like a pilot's I see. Drawing on these reports we asked participants to imagine having been ostracized and criticized by a coworker and then responding with either forgiveness or revenge. So here they just like we're just supposed to imagine what revenge

[00:21:00] would be like would it be like to ostracize them or criticize them back like we don't know. It's Colombian necktie every time. We predicted that participants who imagined having forgiven their coworker would feel more re humanized than participants who imagine having taken revenge. We also assess negative emotions

[00:21:20] positive emotions as well as authentic and hubristic pride just just throw in just a bunch of these constructs just for the hell of it. Both before and after responding to the offense with either forgiveness or revenge. Now you're just like imagining it

[00:21:36] like you don't even have to have somebody victimize you in the past you can just imagine them and then like imagine how you would respond The power of the imagination Tamer. Yeah, I should try it. By the way you know and you said

[00:21:49] they toss in a bunch of these measures and look they're better at stats than I am but they didn't pre-reg, like they only pre-registered one of these studies. That's the big issue. It is a red flag for me. But it's like number 95 on the problems with this

[00:22:07] whole idea. I like what you said before theoretical. Yeah, it's sort of a nightmare. So, yeah imagining that you were offended and imagining that you took I think they actually had people did they have people write down what they would imagine? I don't think so.

[00:22:27] I think they just said did you forgive or did you take revenge? Right. Next participants were randomly assigned to imagine either forgiving or taking revenge against their co-workers. They were just assigned to do it. They imagined that they had been selected by their company to be one of

[00:22:43] oh, they were told what kind of revenge. They imagined that they had been selected by their company to be one of three peer reviewers for the transgressing co-worker and that their company treated these peer reviews seriously so their review would carry weight and personnel decisions.

[00:22:55] Those in the forgiveness condition then read in the end you use the review as an opportunity to forgive your co-worker. You are appropriately honest. You're appropriately honest about your co-worker's strengths and weaknesses and this results in a generally favorable review. Oh, this is terrible. That's not forgiveness.

[00:23:11] That's just you have like some integrity as your job. You might still think they're total fucking assholes and you want to kill them but you're not going to like... Yeah, this is just like where you petty or not kind of thing. Those in the revenge condition

[00:23:23] read in the end you use the review as an opportunity to get back at your co-worker. You focus on your co-worker's weaknesses rather than their strengths. I can't... I feel like we just need to get right to them.

[00:23:33] All right, yeah, we got to get to the voodoo doc because we're going to go... but I want to say just study three. The limitation of studies one and two that they were imagined or that they remembered that none of these cases you're actually forgiving

[00:23:45] or taking revenge is that but they didn't choose that. That neither included a no offense control condition. That's the limitation. Which would confirm that dehumanizing actually occurred not... like compared to not being insulted at all. Conclude that this thing we made up, like how self-humanized you feel.

[00:24:05] So they wanted to determine whether or not like of all of the potential you know downstream effects of being insulted by a co-worker. This sounds like a very millennial paper to write is that really does. Is that you might want to feel like

[00:24:25] you want to harm yourself, right? So you could ask, like does this make you want to hurt yourself? Which would have maybe some problems. So not these authors but other authors have developed a measure that I think... I thought maybe this would speak

[00:24:41] to you giving your penchant for believing in... for believing in supernatural causality. There's a voodoo doll with up to 51 pins. Why 51? I have no idea. 51. But they show you a voodoo doll and they say, this is you. And they say... This is real. This has

[00:25:05] on the right there is a voodoo doll with 51 pins in it. And on the very left it's a voodoo doll I don't know with like only one pin or no pins. And they say, how many pins would you want to stick in yourself?

[00:25:17] This is their measure of self-harm. That's their measure of self-harm. I thought I wanted just for the record. That's study four, I think. Not study four. No, no, I wanted to get straight to the point. I love that they just made predictions about

[00:25:31] like the number of pins that a person would stick in them and their prediction. And their voodoo doll. And their voodoo doll that represented themselves. See this is the thing about this paper. There are these things designed for other people. Like concepts like dehumanization or voodoo dolls.

[00:25:47] Like voodoo dolls aren't designed for yourself. You can just stab pins into yourself. You don't have to stab pins into a voodoo doll. In fact, I always thought it was sort of a clever way of coming up with a measure. If this is a voodoo doll of Tamler,

[00:26:03] what do you want to do? At least I can pretend. But yeah, I could just take a pin and stick it in myself. So, but I guess that's supposed to be like, that's the thing. Like you're like, I would think it shows

[00:26:15] that you don't want to harm yourself because you're sticking a voodoo doll that somebody said is you rather than yourself which you could do at any time. And by the way, you're not even sticking a doll. You're reporting how many needles in a big doll.

[00:26:29] In a picture of a doll. Look, I once did a study that has a ton of flaws. You know, I don't even believe it would replicate probably. But at the very least we got a shock machine and we had people actually shock themselves at higher levels. That's self-harm.

[00:26:49] You could even argue, maybe it is not. But it's way closer to self-harm. Then predicting how many pins you would want to stick in a voodoo doll that was supposed to represent you. I would say this study needs to be run where people actually have the doll.

[00:27:05] And you have 51 pins in front of you. For the research. You couldn't do it on mechanical turf. I guess. That's where you need a grant. By the way, just because I think it's really important to note that they had in this study

[00:27:23] a revenge condition and forgiveness condition again and the measure of self-harm which is zero pins in your self voodoo doll to 51 pins in the self voodoo doll In the revenge condition the number was the average was 7.7 pins. In the forgiveness condition it was 6.84 pins. The standard deviations

[00:27:47] are huge. Standard deviations are huge and so they did I'm not good at stats like this might be kosher to do they did a particular kind of analysis to try to take into account that the range was so restricted and they say that this is a significant difference

[00:28:05] but you're still at the end of the day left with the fact that your doll pin like thing is literally 7.7 pins versus 6.8 pins That's nothing. That's not a thing. This is our top journal in social psychology That's what's amazing. This is your top journal in social psychology

[00:28:23] This is so insane There's a few other things like maybe some of your concerns about humanization being poorly conceptualized or something like that but they actually have two circles that they ask people to draw one of them says self and the other says other humans

[00:28:43] and they have seven of these so it's still a like art scale and number one self and other humans are not like there's no overlap and then seven self and other humans have significant overlap By the way, next to this there's a picture of a voodoo doll

[00:29:01] with 51 pins stabbed into it I'm not sure why they included because no voodoo dolls were harmed in this experiment Because I think that they use the picture as like the scale anchor when you're filling out that form they show you the 51 pin voodoo doll

[00:29:19] and the zero pin voodoo doll so that you can see which is like now you slide how close are you to the 51 pin voodoo doll see the online article for the color version of this figure in case you're looking at the print journal right now

[00:29:35] the JPSB on your coffee table might not have the color can we get to the bigger like to the bigger question here which is is this saying anything that wasn't known about the difference between forgiveness and revenge it was tweeted to us like you guys are pro-revenge now

[00:29:55] what do you think about this but like I think forgiveness is great for people if you get a chance to actually reconcile with somebody who hurt you that's great I think our only point has ever been that revenge doesn't need to be done for its hedonic benefits

[00:30:15] sometimes you just actually want to make sort of like a justice occur when there's no justice to be at mean hurting somebody and just because you feel like shit afterwards doesn't... no you don't you feel more humanized so I think we've been vindicated just not as much

[00:30:31] but I'm like all I want to do is feel a little less like a machine I just want to put like a little fewer voodoo pins or imagine putting a little fewer voodoo pins in doves of myself when I am proud of myself

[00:30:45] for being rational and logical now I'm just confused am I less human or more human just somebody tell me get the scale we'll have to run an experiment with you as a more serious thing to wrap up there's just like 100 different problems with this

[00:31:03] like do you feel because this is sometimes how I feel when I look at the knowledge debate that's my go-to example for philosophy like this is really what we're doing right now is that how you feel like this is your top journal this being serious

[00:31:17] as a social psychologist like how do you feel when you read this yeah I feel I do feel a little dejected because I think that this paper does suffer from some problems that we should be fixing like it's layered it's building a foundation on sand

[00:31:35] and in a way that like I really am surprised that it got in its current form foundations have been laid though like a lot of their scales they say have been validated sure if we looked at like how I have looked at this

[00:31:49] you know I have a student Bronwyn shout out who has looked in depth at all of these scales of dehumanization and I don't personally don't think there's any there there but some of them are worse than others and the ones that we read I'm like

[00:32:01] I just think it's a joke my only regret is that this did not get published in time for the social psychologist to include this in their letter to Vladimir Pustut because I think this might have tipped the scale well now he's just gonna view himself as an animal

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[00:38:58] for all your support. Okay, let's get to the paper that I think you really want to read instead of the panpsychism philosophy of mind paper Tamler. And this is paper called the common consent argument for the existence

[00:39:09] of nature spirits by Titty Smith. Did we get this from a listener? We got this from a listener definitely maybe on Patreon. It was one of the finalists for our Patreon selected episode and it looked great

[00:39:25] to me like it looks super interesting. So the argument that Smith is making here is he's he's reviving he's bringing back an old argument for the existence of God called the common consent argument. And that argument went something like, look, if everybody in all of history pretty

[00:39:45] much has believed in God, then that should be taken as evidence or that entails that God exists. Right. Which yeah, I'm not sure who Yeah, that's like a fancy argument in that form. I don't know. It seems like one of those old timey philosophy of religion arguments. Yeah.

[00:40:07] And so Smith revives it in tries to revive it in this paper by basically saying, no look, like this is laughable as proof that God exists. But there might be something salvageable in this kind of argument. And the argument that he is Titty, a he, you know,

[00:40:27] Yes, he is puts forth is that, well, the original argument that because everybody believes in God, God must exist was flawed because there are a ton of like cultures who did not believe in any like create or not have a theistic right high God view.

[00:40:48] And also that that like a lot of the reasons that people believe in God is because it's been passed down from generation to generation. It's not like every one of these groups independently just perceived the existence of God.

[00:41:02] No, they were like brought up in a religious tradition where belief was like just endemic to what it meant to grow up in these cultures. Right. An argument for theism can't really succeed here because as he says, proselytizing theistic traditions typically generate

[00:41:21] agreement by a process of cultural diffusion. So he says, look, most of the world now is either Christian or Muslim, but it's not because they all had some intuition that there must be like some single God. They're all just part of these Abrahamic religions that did a whole

[00:41:36] bunch of conversion through one way or another. So cultural. So the existence of agreement in the world, like the fact that billions of people believe in a high, quote unquote, high God, as they're called, can't really be used as evidence for the existence of God.

[00:41:51] But if we look at cultures where there was no communication across those cultures and still see the presence of a common belief, then this might actually be evidence for the existence of whatever that belief is. And in this case, he says a belief in animism,

[00:42:11] the view that there are spirits in animals in nature. That is like in rivers, trees, mountains, river, all of Miyazaki. Let me. Yeah, exactly. This is what people were telling us is like when we were disappointed

[00:42:25] with panpsychism, it was like, this is what you want to look at. If that's what you want, if you want to enter Miyazaki land. Right. So Smith says, thus, while it is true that animists are in the overwhelming minority, separate animistic communities have

[00:42:40] nevertheless come to agree about important religious propositions while in a state of extreme historical and geographical isolation from each other. And he says this is a funny way of rhetorically presenting this because somewhat surprisingly, my efforts lead me to the discovery

[00:42:58] that the best version of the argument supports the proposition not that a God exists, but that some version of animism is probably Tamley. Tamler, probably true. Yeah. I mean, obviously it's not it doesn't entail and you can't use

[00:43:11] that kind of language in what really is like an inference to the best explanation kind of argument. Right? It's like. Here's the phenomenon, which is just all these geographically isolated communities seem to believe in like 100 percent, according to the study

[00:43:30] that he he cites, although it doesn't go really into the details of that like 100 percent of them believe in some form of animism. The best explanation for that might be that that's because animism is true and the analogy that he uses, which is a problematic

[00:43:47] analogy based on like, you know, the argument that he goes on to make. He says, look, if a bunch of different people smell milk and independently agree that the milk has gone bad, and that's what they

[00:44:00] say that the milk has gone bad, then it's the best explanation for that is probably I mean, he doesn't use best explanation terminology, but that's what this is, I think that it's reasonable to conclude that the milk has gone bad. Obviously, it's not impossible.

[00:44:15] It's it's not impossible that the milk is fine and that they all have some weird scent disorder. But like that. So that's the idea is you have these people who are independently not influenced by anyone else or each other just coming around to a belief

[00:44:30] that's prima facie reason to think that the that what they believe is true. Right. And so he points to this this agreement, this independent agreement as epistemically sort of just very valuable. And he says, this isn't the way we do science, right?

[00:44:51] So like if people independently arrive at the same conclusion scientifically, people who've never talked to each other, then we think that this this scientific claim has a greater chance of being true because it's not just that they're like influenced socially to believe the thing that they believe.

[00:45:07] And I will say that while for reasons we'll talk about I don't find this argument compelling, that is the form of argument that makes me, you know, agnostic open about the existence of spirits and ghosts and all of that in general.

[00:45:22] It is that there are so many different people in different traditions across in so many different historical periods, including now, who have claimed to have these kinds of experiences. And, you know, you think the best explanation for that is,

[00:45:39] you know, some sort of debunking explanation about the brain or about, you know, from evolutionary psychology or from cognitive science in some form. And I think that given how unflashed out that is, another leading candidate is because there are such things or things that approximate.

[00:46:01] Yeah, I do know that this is why you believe or say say you're not thinking about what you believe. There are just a number of things that really bothered me about this paper so much so that I was going to ask you, why don't we make this one?

[00:46:15] The opening segment because I feel like like there is just so much handwaviness in the arguments that he he uses to support this claim about animism that it reminded me of the age change paper. We're like, he'll just say things. This paper is published in the Australasian Journal

[00:46:37] of Philosophy pretty recently, right? Yeah, 2019. I think. Yeah, 2019. Wasn't that paper the other paper published in Australasian? No, like Australasian is like a top five, maybe top ten generalist journal in philosophy. Like this is something that you're very psyched if you get a paper accepted to this journal.

[00:47:00] Is is is this you're saying this is a reason to think that this is a higher quality paper? No, like I like I am saying that I'm surprised. And like, you know, and especially since, you know, one of the things

[00:47:14] they're kind of known for is rigor, you know, like a kind of rigor. Yeah, where I think that you're right, that there's just so many things. For example, like what about so do you want to describe the study since you looked into it?

[00:47:27] Yeah, he cites just to support that all these different cultures believe in animism. Yeah, so so the idea is OK, if it is the case that it would be compelling if independent cultures arrived at similar beliefs without any exchange of ideas.

[00:47:44] Well, Hunter gather still there are still hunter gather cultures that exist that have not had much contact. And so he points to a paper that we'll put a link to called Hunter gathers and the origins of religion published in 2016 in Human Nature that looks at the beliefs of 33

[00:48:04] different hunter gather societies, looks at their religious beliefs specifically. So there's a paper by anthropologists to see what kinds of beliefs they have and just see how common they are. And in these 33 societies, if they sort of come up with a categorization

[00:48:21] of different kinds of religious beliefs, including animism, belief in an afterlife, shamanism, ancestor worship, high gods. So this is high gods being, you know, like any god that's hierarchically like has more control and more power than human beings, active ancestor

[00:48:40] worship and active high gods, which I guess those two are beliefs that not just that your ancestors and that gods exist, but that they actually play a role in your in like, you know, in human affairs. And it turns out it was that they work out, you know,

[00:48:56] they go on the treadmill every so often. It's like no, no fat, no fat ancestors. And so it turns out that animism is the most common belief in this sample. Thirty of thirty three hundred other societies were 100 percent

[00:49:11] of those cultures have some form of belief that there are spirits in nature. Yeah. So the details on what it is they actually believe are very hazy in this paper. Yeah, this is one of the frustrating things. So he said he quotes this.

[00:49:29] He says in these animic systems, humans and not human nonhumans are conceived as possessing the same type of interiority, the same type of interiority. And it is because of this common internal disposition that nonhumans are said to possess social characteristics. They respect kinship rules.

[00:49:47] They obey ethical codes and they they engage in ritual activity. So I mean, I guess that sounds kind of specific, but I just I'd love to know the details of what it actually like. I'd like to get an account of what they were told these anthropologists.

[00:50:06] Yeah. Yeah. Right. In this paper, there is a bit of dismissal of the possibility that it's not truly agreement if, say, Native Americans believe that there's a mountain here that has a spirit and some other culture in Africa believes only that trees have spirits.

[00:50:26] He says, but that's OK. There's still animists. When you look at the original paper, it also is pretty lax on the details. So they just they have I think these are categories of belief that other people have come up with that must be fleshed out somewhere.

[00:50:44] Like what what is the nature of like what counts as theism, what counts as animism, what counts as as ancestor worship? But they like their main goal wasn't to descriptively present what these beliefs are. But rather their goal was actually something

[00:51:03] that that I don't think Smith would like care for. The goal was to figure out like how these ideas spread. So the so the idea is that if you look at linguistic and genetic analyses of these these various hunter-gatherer societies,

[00:51:22] you can get some sense of their common origins. And when you look at their beliefs and sort of overlap the structure of those beliefs with the structure of similarities in linguistics and in genetics, what you can see is a story by which like

[00:51:41] there's the original population of people who must have believed these things that then sort of branched out. So what happens is that like the argument at least in this paper is that animism is at the heart of almost all of the rest of them

[00:51:56] because they think that animism is kind of like a necessary requirement to believe believing that spirits exist is necessary to believe that there's a big God in the sky. Right. So it's sort of like the common denominator of them all.

[00:52:11] And they think that it's sort of like other beliefs can fall out of those beliefs, but some of them just happen more than others. So belief in afterlife and shamanism is only there in 26 of the 33. All right. So so he reforms.

[00:52:26] He reforms the common consent argument adapts it to this. He says near enough everyone in near enough every isolated community and near enough every historical era independently agrees that rocks, rivers, mountains and trees have causally efficacious spirits. Whatever near enough everyone in nearly every

[00:52:47] and near enough every isolated community and near enough every historical area believes independently of the beliefs of outsiders is probably true. Therefore it is probable that some rocks mountains, rivers and trees have called causally efficacious. Spirits. Now here's where there's so many things that are just slippery.

[00:53:10] Number one, what's the evidence that in every historical era, every isolated community, they looked at 33 communities in our era, right? In our historical era. And I don't think he cited research about other historical eras and, you know, causally isolated communities there, right?

[00:53:33] Is that addressed as far as I could tell, it's not addressed, right? No, it's not. And there's not even, you know, it is such a weird reliance on this one paper and this one finding because it's not even

[00:53:45] that these people think that that the ones who did the original study think that they have an exhaustive account of even contemporary hunter gatherer societies. Right. So just the ones that they looked at. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:58] So may or not may or may not be true that all contemporary hunter gatherer societies have this, but it is unclear and it is especially unclear that they would have all had it in the past. And it's also like unclear what exactly it is they believe, right?

[00:54:13] Because that is never pinned down. Like this is why I think the sour milk analogy is so disanalogous is because in that case we're very clear what we're talking about. Right. Your smelling milk is it doesn't have that sour milk smell or not.

[00:54:29] It's a very clear kind of yes, no kind of deal. But here it's like, well, what exactly do they believe here? Causefully efficacious he talks about sometimes he talks about they have an interiority like ours.

[00:54:42] Like and what does that even mean that they have an interiority like ours is like do rivers get like horny? Do they get you know, it's like, right? Like, what are we talking about here? I think and the thing is, I bet if you go into the details

[00:54:58] of what all these isolated communities that they studied believe in, I'm sure you would find a ton of very different beliefs concerning the spirits in all the different things that they say have spirits. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think if you somehow managed to get, say,

[00:55:17] a representative from all 33 of these and like they all got together and they were able to speak each other's language, to what extent would they actually agree on any of the metaphysical claims that they each held? Like it's totally unclear and therefore it's unclear what comes of this.

[00:55:36] So like, yes, we have put these beliefs in a category, a fairly broad category. And now somehow this is evidence that the broad category is true. And the reason this is important is because I think the plausibility of the argument depends on everyone believing the same thing

[00:55:54] and especially maybe agreeing in perception, which says earlier on that they perceive the same thing. Right? Like that's why this argument is plausible. That's why in the case of the Kepler and whoever that was trying to double check a Galileo prediction, right?

[00:56:13] They did it independently, but they're both looking for the same exact thing. And so when they say, yes, I found it, I found it too, then that it's actually meaning something. But here it's like, like who the hell knows what they're exactly it is that they're saying?

[00:56:29] And not only that, it's not even clear that they're perceiving it at all. It's just that they believe that they're looking at rivers and feeling like the rivers are talking to them or maybe they are. But nothing that is presented here indicates that.

[00:56:42] Right. Oh, you know, also, so there's a few things that I think we've got it, we have probably get to the debunking explanation for the point that I'm about to make. But there's something about the also the theism point that bugs me, which is he had waves that.

[00:56:55] Well, look, the agreement about whether or not God exists or gods exist is is so culturally communicated that we can't make anything of it. But there was there's no attempt at all to try to uncover how many independently isolated religions have come to believe in gods.

[00:57:16] Right. And and I think that the number is higher than he wants to say because he sort of falls on Abrahamic monotheism as the thing that represents theism, but there's so many different kinds of theistic beliefs, right? Multiple gods and, you know.

[00:57:31] But I think actually he says that as also an argument against the theistic version of the common consent argument, there isn't that much agreement. And and like when you're talking about the spiritual beliefs of, you know, Taoists or Buddhists, they don't believe in some sort of creator

[00:57:48] God. Yeah. And they believe in something more. So it's like, but that totally applies to your own argument. Your own vision. This is right. That's right. Exactly. And I would have liked to have seen at least some attempt

[00:58:02] if there's going to be, you know, this is really resting a lot on these empirical premises, which which are either true or not. I would have liked to have seen some sort of discussion about how, you know, whether or not there are independent cultures who have come

[00:58:17] to believe in either theism or monotheism of some sort. Yeah, I agree. Like especially since at times he seems to just want to show that his argument is more probable than the theistic version of this argument.

[00:58:34] Although at other times wants to say, no, no, no, this is a good argument. And we should believe probably in river spirits. By the way, Alvin planting us sounds kind of crazy. We should read some. We should definitely think that would might that might be fun. Yeah.

[00:58:50] So yeah, you want to go to the evolutionary debunking arguments because this is the kind of thing that Dave likes to do when he disenchants the world. Yeah. Yeah. So talk about like arguments of the best explanation. You would think that this would be a substantial counter explanation

[00:59:10] for what's going on, but in three paragraphs or whatever, he completely destroys the evolutionary debunking arguments. So the argument could be that the reason for commonalities in these kinds of beliefs is simply that, you know, we share the same kinds of brains

[00:59:28] and these brains have mechanisms that although adaptive can misfire. And so what's happening is that for good evolutionary reasons, we have brains that see agency and see patterns in nature. That we over extend these kind of agency and attribute it to things

[00:59:54] much like you would say, you know, like if you see, you know, an outlet, it kind of looks like a face or, you know, a car kind of looks like a face. That's because we have like hyperactive face detection

[01:00:05] mechanisms in our brain that are leading us to oversee faces where they don't actually exist. And the idea is like you want to air on the side of thinking the thing is alive or has agency, because if you look at a snake

[01:00:19] and you think, oh, that's probably just a stick. And then it'll bite you. And so the people who who didn't over correct for agency all died out. That's right. Yeah. Right. Like it's it's not it's not a terrible error to think that something

[01:00:38] is alive when it's not it is potentially fatal error to think that it's not alive when it actually is. And so speaking of hand wavy, by the way, but maybe maybe that's like I feel less hand wavy than the others.

[01:00:53] But they seem like they could like like in a different mood. I would think that this is more because it's also just completely like not testable. It's just pure speculation. But it is. Well, yeah, it's the it's the application of testable findings to yes, but it is applying.

[01:01:12] You can't go back in time and see whether or not people who saw snakes were less likely to die. It's true. It's a just so story. Yeah, there are there are just so stories and there are just so stories though, you know, it's like, yeah, that's right.

[01:01:23] We could talk about these kinds of arguments. We've talked about them in the context of like morality and like when it's applied to ethical intuitions and ethical beliefs. Yeah, way back when we talked about evolutionary debunking arguments for morale, I would be interested in doing it

[01:01:37] for for other stuff like this, you know, for epistemological debates. Yeah, yeah, totally. Have you done this podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Dave, which of these things do you do? Teeth grinding? Do you have digestive issues? Do you get headaches or do you doom scroll?

[01:02:00] Do you not sleep enough? Do you sleep too much? You under eight? Do you overeat? I think the only thing that I that is not me on this list is overeating. Just for some reason, stress never makes me overeat. But under eating too much, too little sleep, doom

[01:02:18] scrolling, teeth grinding, headaches, digestive issues. It's just too close to home. Yeah. The one I don't do is sleep too much. That's never something I've been able to do. And I wish I could sometimes. But yeah, I'm pretty much all the other ones as well.

[01:02:36] And I it doesn't surprise me that that is an indicator of stress. I feel like our world is getting more stressful by the day. Stress shows up in all kinds of ways. And in a world that is telling you to do more, just a culture,

[01:02:54] just a culture that's telling you to do more, sleep less and grind, grind, hustle, hustle. Here is a reminder to take care of yourself, do less and maybe try some therapy as a way to help you. I certainly know a lot of people who therapy has completely turned

[01:03:17] their life around and in ways that they couldn't have expected before they did it and better help is customized online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to.

[01:03:38] So if you're new to therapy and you just want to kind of see how it is without necessarily going through the whole rigmarole of going to see somebody or setting up another Zoom or Teams call, whatever is suitable for you,

[01:03:56] whatever feels comfortable for you, you can do for better help. And it is much more affordable than in-person therapy. So give it a try and see if online therapy can help lower some of your stress. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp and very bad

[01:04:13] Wizards listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com.vbw. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P.com. So one of the things that he says here is that, look, if you have an unreliable cognitive faculty, if you believe that what's going on is that brains are misfiring,

[01:04:39] it would be weird if they misfire. Like misfiring doesn't lead to agreement. It should lead people to believe all kinds of things, but not agreement, which I think is just a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a

[01:04:51] people to believe all kinds of things, but not agreement, which I think is just a completely weird claim to make because unreliable cognitive faculties are often systematically unreliable. So the reason we all see the visual illusions like the shepherd table,

[01:05:10] the reason that we all think that those two tables must be really, really different is because we all have the same unreliable faculties telling us that they look different. So there's just systematic errors that the brain causes. And like there's like the entire fields of perception and judgment

[01:05:26] decision making are all about how systematic errors arise because of these mechanisms. So not only that, but also like for all we know they are, they are coming up with different kinds of. That too. Right? Like it's not that every culture says, OK, rivers and mountains are alive,

[01:05:45] but like and evergreen trees are not alive. But like, you know, and if you believe it, you we're going to kill you. Right? Like those tree worshipers, those pagan tree worshipers. But that's not how it is, right?

[01:06:00] So it seems like if this hypothesis that we over correct and seeing agency like that could be exactly what we're finding, which is that people do see different kinds of things as alive with agency and having agency.

[01:06:17] Yeah, if what he's arguing is contrary to what Tamar just said, saying like there is agreement, like if we even grant that there is agreement, which we're not willing to grant, then you know what he tries to say is a while you could

[01:06:29] believe that it's a cognitive error, but I don't think so. But you could also believe something else. Suppose that all hunter gatherer religions for sure believed in something similar. Like reading this paper and then reading what he cited led me down

[01:06:42] like kind of a cool rabbit hole of this anthropology of religion that tries to understand why certain beliefs emerge, why certain kinds of religion emerge. And one of the things that they say is that in that you don't really see

[01:06:57] theistic religions emerge until you have so like hierarchical gods until you have non egalitarian hierarchical societies. So like once agriculture becomes a thing and then there's this sort of division of labor and you have hierarchy, that's when you see them merge

[01:07:15] because hierarchical gods kind of don't make sense or aren't needed for hunter gatherer, which are really egalitarian societies. And so it could be that there is something like if my daily existence depends on, you know, the deer being there to hunt

[01:07:31] or the bison being there to hunt, all sorts of things like the river and the mountain, these are all really important to your sort of everyday survival, it's easy to see why you might be prone to believing that these there are spirits in those things.

[01:07:45] Whereas if you're living in a little town in an agricultural society, your day to day depends on something entirely different. And so your beliefs might emerge as different. Right. That's Andrew. I know some of this work too is the God of the Bible or the Greek gods

[01:08:00] are really just almost metaphors for the kings and the rulers of the various societies in which these religions emerge. You know, again, like a just so story to an extent, but there is a kind of coincidence where you don't see those kinds of gods until you see hierarchical

[01:08:17] structures within the society and then all of a sudden you have this kind of hierarchical theology. So yeah. And I think that that I wouldn't call them just so story. I wouldn't put them in the same category because they're at least

[01:08:31] the very least you can look at the patterns and you could falsify it. You could say if the claim is that only hierarchical societies have theistic religions, presumably you could see in the historical record. You might. Yeah, you might. If you didn't already know,

[01:08:50] like the problem with some of the evolutionary psychology stuff is we already know what we're prone to and what we're not prone to. And so like it's hard to make predictions, but we could easily still uncover records, you know, through archaeological

[01:09:05] research or something of like a society that seemed like they had a hierarchical gods, but it was an egalitarian society. Yeah, gather like society or something. Although did this one have in this study? Did they find any hierarchical?

[01:09:21] No, because they were all of these hunter gather societies are really egalitarian. Like there's no. But they saw they had like 39 percent of them believed in high gods. An active. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, in active high gods.

[01:09:35] But it is kind of fascinating because even if you have no hypothesis whatsoever to just go and categorize religious beliefs and then look at the conditions under which they emerge seems really like kind of cool. Definitely. And like I think you should be open to

[01:09:53] some sort of supernatural explanation. But even if you're not or even if, you know, you think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, whatever the explanation that you come up with is just going to be interesting because there's going to be cool patterns and connections that you can make

[01:10:08] between the religions and the societal structure and the insta whatever institutions they have. Yeah. One of the things that did sort of also bother me was when he's talking about the difference between theism and animism.

[01:10:28] And he says like it's more plausible to believe in animism than in theism because he is and believes in disembodied minds. Right. So if you're talking about the kinds of things that might have minds,

[01:10:39] it seems as if a disembodied spirit is less plausible than a river or a tree. And I just found this kind of a weird way to argue because I actually think that that even non-scientific societies like I feel like having a brain

[01:10:56] is just what we know causes minds. I don't know, a river spirit and a disembodied God seem to me to be on similar grounds on like like brains are what we know cause minds. And so like map that a rabbit has a mind seems like a pretty reasonable.

[01:11:11] Now. So wait, here's the thing that I would disagree with. I take your general point, but like we don't know that brains cause minds because we don't understand consciousness. We don't understand how the brain causes consciousness.

[01:11:25] We think obviously we think that there's causal links there because you fuck with the brain and then the consciousness seems to go away as far as we know. But like we don't understand how that works. So but I would extend that then to the disembodied spirits too.

[01:11:41] Yeah. Well, let me clarify. I mean, so I think we definitely know that brains cause minds. We don't need to know how they cause minds to know that they do. So like when you fuck with some brain, I don't know that.

[01:11:52] Well, when you fuck with someone's brain, their mind goes away. Like I don't know of any better evidence. Like when you fuck with someone's brain with acid, their consciousness changes. Like we don't need to solve the problem of how brains cause consciousness to know that they do right.

[01:12:05] But it's also true that we don't know if brains are necessary to cause minds like that is for sure not true. It would be that some other thing can cause a mind. Yeah, good. That's right. Yes.

[01:12:16] And so so I guess you could have a theory why it's more plausible that rivers have the mechanism that gives rise to mind than than it is to just believe like a bearded spirit in the sky. But I don't think

[01:12:29] yeah, like would panps I can say that because they would say, look, a river is at least composed of all the same conscious atoms that we're composed with. And so it's more likely that something that's composed with

[01:12:44] these atoms has a mind than something that's not composed of anything. Yeah, I guess it does go. You're reminding me about how panps like is and might turn into something boring because it's like, well, everything that has atoms has minds.

[01:12:59] But but this is where I got a little bit confused because isn't the claim that like the river has a spirit? A kin metaphysically to saying that like there is a spirit in the sky?

[01:13:12] Like, do the do the and this is where the details matter, as you were saying. So this is I also looked at a paper, but we looked at very, very different papers, which I think corresponds to what people might think we would we would turn to.

[01:13:26] But towards the end of this paper, the Titty Smith paper, he he refers to Tim Ingold and and quotes him as saying that animism is a condition of being alive to the world characterized by a heightened sensitivity

[01:13:41] and responsiveness in perception and action to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one one moment to the next. So I went and looked at this paper. Here's a quote, right? He says, according to a long established convention, animism is a system

[01:13:57] of belief that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert. But this convention, as I shall show, is misleading on two counts. First, we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world, but with the condition of being in it.

[01:14:12] This could be described as a condition of being alive to the world characterized by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness in perception and action to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next.

[01:14:25] Animacy then is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather, and this is my second point, it is the dynamic transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less

[01:14:44] person like or thing like continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the life world in short is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.

[01:15:03] Does that clear things up for you? I was going to say, could you say it in your own words? I think the idea is and this is it relates in its but I think in a more exciting way, another way of describing the panpsychic view that this kind

[01:15:22] of spirit is at the bottom of everything. Right? Like the we tend to think about it like you just said, like, is it that the river just has a spirit in it or something that's like that?

[01:15:33] It's like, no, it's like spirit and animacy is like the ground level of being. This also has like a lot of parallels, I think, with Buddhist way of understanding reality, animacy or animateness. He calls it animacy is just like the kind of fundamental features of reality.

[01:15:56] One of the fundamental features of reality and how that manifests itself is going to be different depending on what kind of thing we're talking about. But they're all independent or sorry, interdependent. Like when I think when he says reciprocally bringing themselves into existence continually, it makes sense.

[01:16:15] I mean, I think that really well, no, I mean, it's still it's still to me is a highly implausible view to hold. But what does make sense is that I saw how easily I was imputing my notion of spirit, like a dualistic notion of spirit.

[01:16:35] And it does sound like that description that it just is like the force just is spirit actually sounds a lot closer to everything like all of those religious or whatever proto religious views are that that it's not as if there is

[01:16:52] this external thing that is inhabiting the tree. Right, just is the tree. Yeah. And so like he says, this is an anthropologist, this ingold guy. And he said he was studying the native hunters of northern Canada, the women. Jeet Kree life is his continuous birth.

[01:17:12] Life is the an anemic ontology. It's not an emanation but a generation of being like I could get really into this stuff, but a generation of being in a world that is not preordained, but incipient,

[01:17:26] forever on the verge of the actual one is continually present as witness to that moment, always moving like the crest of a wave at which the world is about to disclose itself for what it is. And then he talks about Merleau Pong tea. This is a cool paper.

[01:17:40] I mean, it's a little wacky, but it's a cool paper because it is doing what I fully support, which is just kind of trying to get people to be open to a more enchanted kind of world than they've been like drilled into thinking

[01:17:57] is the world we live in. I we our minds have moved in such different trajectories over time that I feel like what you just read to me is bordering on Jordan Peterson. And I have this deep fear that you actually like if you if you ever

[01:18:13] bothered to listen to Jordan Peterson lectures, like you might come out really liking them. And and I think that like he's a young man, right? Like I like some of that stuff. Yeah. And to me, there is no there is nothing that's been drilled into me about

[01:18:30] believing in a nonenchanted world. In fact, it's the opposite, right? So I'm coming from such a different place as you. What was drilled into me was believing in the supernatural. And to me, like the realization has been that there is no good reason

[01:18:45] to believe in any of these things, right? Like that the belief in the personal, you know, Judeo-Christian deity that I that I was told existed falls falls apart upon scrutiny for the same reasons that like tree spirits would. Right. That there's just there's just nothing there.

[01:19:04] And and, you know, if we're like, suppose that we're both contrarian and like we started at a different place, we're just we're rebelling against different ways of thinking. But I do think there is also a philosophical disagreement that we have. I'm sure there's like sociological temper.

[01:19:23] I don't think so. You have more faith in science as a tool that can explain reality than I do. If you are a little more skeptical about what science can accomplish and what it can't, then you're going to be more open to other ways of understanding

[01:19:45] the world. Yeah, although I truly don't get why. So say you refer to it as faith in science. And I didn't say faith. I just said you had more faith in science. No, I didn't like that. OK, OK.

[01:19:58] But it's not that I believe science has all the answer. There's so much and we both agree on this. There's so much that science, you know, our brains are limited, let alone our understanding of, you know, of like fundamental reality.

[01:20:11] It seems it seems difficult to ever get there. But there is a need to constrain like our wild imagination in a way that sort of science brings discipline into saying like what could plausibly be true and what couldn't plausibly be true?

[01:20:31] And so one of the things that about this paper specifically that relates to this is that it doesn't get off the ground for me because agreements can never be the sole like the sole epistemic criteria, because when I say that I don't believe in spirits,

[01:20:50] it's also because if I believed in spirits, it would have to alter a whole lot of other things that I believe to be true. And and they it all sort of hinges together on this sort of worldview that

[01:21:02] if things are causally efficacious, we should be able to in some way record their you know, their causing things like that because or else I find it really hard. You know, you get you get annoyed with me probably appropriately for saying like why not believe in in leprechauns?

[01:21:17] But in some way what I'm trying to communicate is like. I could go wild and believe all kinds of shit. And there has to be something holding me back from believing like all of those things might be true. Right.

[01:21:29] And I agree like but it doesn't have to be that somebody has recorded it or you know, there are other things that can hold you back besides just like peer review journal, mechanical Turk survey, you know. Australasian reviewer. Yeah, but no, here's where I 100% agree with you.

[01:21:48] This is why I'm surprised that it's in the Australasian Journal. I think part of the problem is he doesn't really identify it as an inference to the best explanation argument, which is clearly what it is. That's what the plausibility of that argument kind of relies on implicitly.

[01:22:04] So number one and we've talked about it, we're not exactly sure what we're trying to explain here because it's like we don't know yet the thing to be explained what those beliefs are in more detail.

[01:22:16] But number two, when he's saying that animism is true is the best explanation for all these reports from these isolated societies. What you have to consider is, well, what kinds of laws of physics would this violate if animism was true? Like how does that fit in?

[01:22:33] Because that's part of evaluating whether it's the best explanation or not. Is how does it fit with like the rest of how we understand reality? Yeah, no, that's a really good point. That's just enough to say, well, this is definitely not probably true

[01:22:48] because then we would have to completely revise our understanding of how reality works according to physics and according to like our best understanding of the laws of Nate. And the fact that that's not even like I think there's a way you can try

[01:23:02] to reply to this in a different form of argument, but you have to address that. You can't just ignore the fact that, you know, like in an inference to the best explanation argument that your

[01:23:12] explanation requires that like the laws of nature are not what we thought they were. Yeah, there's a balance of belief that we have about all sorts of things, including the physical world that some that affect each other.

[01:23:23] And, you know, I was thinking about this sort of the reliance on the claim about agreement outside of the world of science. It feels to me as if like there are so many reasons to be suspicious

[01:23:38] that agreement is a is a truth tracking, you know, like agreement over time. Because surely like there are things that like like the inequality of men and women are something that we would say we were just wrong about.

[01:23:51] But like hands down every society must have believed that that was true than animism. Well, maybe we should take that. There it is. The author before we dive into your intersectional paradise, you know, maybe we should take that seriously.

[01:24:12] This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by super speciosa Kratom. Tamler, this weekend I was in Toronto and I was just walking through the old stomping grounds that I had when I lived there. Actually, when we started recording this podcast and I walked like,

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[01:25:35] I haven't fully figured it out yet. I don't know if you have a smoothie. I can't imagine that washing rinse. You know, I tried to put it with orange juice ones, but I don't know about that. So yeah, if you have listeners have any suggestions on powder.

[01:25:52] I don't think you're supposed to snort it. No, probably not. Although that's a good idea. I might try that. I use it for editing the episode by the way. That's one thing I absolutely use it for.

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[01:26:49] Thanks to Super Specialist for sponsoring this episode. I had another sort of a bone to pick. The author says here when he's talking about the widespread beliefs of animism and so so he's talking about the original paper that he's citing and he says,

[01:27:13] well, they believe they actually believe that this has been transmitted, right? Which they do. They believe that there was some like original along time. Yeah, however, I do not believe that such a finding of indeed correct is fatal

[01:27:23] to the claim that this agreement gives prima facie support to the claim that animism is true. The very fact that animistic beliefs have been retained across so many millennia is nearly miraculous, but suppose that we have the kinds of brains that track truth.

[01:27:40] And and that's why people believe in animism. Wouldn't it be a bit more robust? Like, why don't we see it? Yeah. Wouldn't we be really tempted to believe in animism in the same way that's the other

[01:27:54] thing that's not that's just ignored is why does most of the world? I know we are not isolated communities. Yeah. But why does most of the world not believe in? Yeah. At least how can you drop off so easily? Like, how could I have?

[01:28:06] I never thought like the river is alive. Yeah. Right. It's hard to feel that it's just part of like part of our perception. And you know, who knows? I'm sure culture plays a really strong role, but like it does seem like it would be

[01:28:20] a little more robust, like it's barely hanging on in these 33 like hunter gatherers. And that's why we like we really need to know the nature of these beliefs, like how they come about them. Like do they talk to the trees?

[01:28:33] Do they feel like the trees talk to them? Yeah. If everybody thought that trees talked in all these isolated communities and it was something specific enough like that, that they're actually communicating with them. Well, that would be something then I would want to take more seriously.

[01:28:50] And it would be interesting. But there's still the question was, well, how come I don't trees don't talk to me or anybody that I know? Right. So that would still be a question that you would have to address.

[01:29:00] I mean, there's so many problems with this argument that they don't nail down what it is exactly that they agree on and then also don't investigate why or how. So the argument for my position has to be a lot better than what you get here.

[01:29:17] Unfortunately, you know, it made it made me like actually ponder the idea of writing an article like against this. But this just seems like a waste of time. But so I will at least give it credit in that sense.

[01:29:33] It made me think of all of the reasons why I thought it was a bad argument. Here's one question I would have for you and you're just general epistemological stance, right? If somebody said, look, our science cannot explain how neurons firing in a certain

[01:29:51] way leads to the phenomenon of consciousness, right? Like we just don't know if it goes against. It might even just go against what we believe the laws of nature to be. But it certainly is not something that has been explained how that works. You agree with that.

[01:30:06] You've said and you think that that like might remain a mystery forever. Like we might not have the types of things. Yeah, figure it out like how that works. Now let's say somebody came along and says, well, right, so we shouldn't believe

[01:30:22] in conscious experiences because we don't have any plausible explanation for how that could come about. It seems like that same structure of argument could lead you or tempt you to a limit ofism about consciousness. But of course, there's one reason why. Yeah, right.

[01:30:42] Yeah. And that is that I have that I feel I have consciousness and that Sam Harris said on an episode like consciousness is the one thing you can't deny. Right. And it's not like I think the question I think we don't even know how to

[01:30:58] formulate the question properly, but because it's not really that say the scientific worldview is inconsistent with the fact that I have consciousness. It's more like it's this feeling of just like being very incomplete.

[01:31:14] But there is another belief that might fit the bill a bit more, like with at least the spirit in which you're asking the question. And that is belief in in a genetic freedom, which I kind of endorse.

[01:31:30] That really does seem inconsistent with the laws of physics in a way that I find harder to reconcile. Yeah, it might even be against the laws of logic. So right. Right. No, but so I think this so this fact, I think, has to be part of any argument

[01:31:49] for something more supernatural, which would take the form of well, we might be tempted to deny consciousness or agentic freedom, except for the fact that we feel like we have it. And it seems fundamental to our experience.

[01:32:05] And if you're not going to believe that, like, it seems like you really that's like the basis of all. Yeah, even if you believe firmly that we're in a simulation, it seems like the whole yeah, you can never deny it.

[01:32:16] You know, and then given then all the vivid testimony and some of the vivid experiences, like so say that you had had a couple of what you consider like supernatural experiences or something like that, or someone like me who hasn't

[01:32:31] really had something exactly like that maybe has had like transcendental kind of feelings or experiences, but not not like taking the form of like a ghost or anything like that, except the one that broke the glass.

[01:32:45] You might say, look, it's true that this isn't something that is explained by science right now, but like neither is consciousness, neither is this kind of agentic freedom that we feel ourselves to have.

[01:32:58] So this is why we have to be open to something that seems at odds with or at least completely unexplained by our current scientific understanding. You know, if there's just enough of these experiences and enough testimony

[01:33:16] to these experiences, or if you have one of these experiences yourself, it's like I think you would want to for the same reasons that we might believe in these other things. We should be open to belief in those things as well.

[01:33:30] And then, of course, the thing that would like matter there is what are some competing explanations for those experiences other than that they really tracked something real and that's where you think we have a better explanation for all of those experiences. I do. I think so.

[01:33:47] I think of it and I do think that the belief in my agency, let's say this way, belief in my consciousness is strong evidence just sort of by definition feels like undeniable. Belief in my agency is also something I experience every day, but it is admittedly

[01:34:08] I think for me harder to reconcile. So like I have to remain doubtful as to whether or not I have the sort of agency that might make me morally responsible. But you certainly feel like you certainly feel like.

[01:34:20] And so that would have that would be the thing that has to be explained. But one one explanation is that you have it. Right. And the other explanation is something. Exactly, as so many have written, maybe this is just sort of like a phenomenon or whatever.

[01:34:33] My belief that disembodied minds exist violates more, I think, of my the things I believe about what kinds of things cause minds. And I've never had a supernatural experience. And so it's not very difficult for me to.

[01:34:53] It's not like I'm walking around thinking about how do I explain? Yeah, how do I explain the fact that like, you know, a voice was talking to me from from the void? And you know, it's interesting because being raised super religious and being

[01:35:06] told that God and angels existed and they, you know, that intercessory prayer worked and that I had a guardian angel and that evil spirits, you know, like fallen angels were actually trying to make me fall into temptation. I remember telling my mother repeatedly as a young kid,

[01:35:23] like, why can't I see any of them? Like, why can't I have? Why can't God talk to me? And at one point even saying, and this is from a 70s that swear that the devil is almost more metaphysically present than God

[01:35:36] in our theology, saying, like, why can't like a demon show them? Like, I would take that. I would. I wouldn't mind how it take like getting just fucked by a demon. Exactly. Like in the ways that like illustrations of like witches, you know,

[01:35:53] like a big demon cock just violating me. Yeah. And I just have, you know, I haven't had anything like that. And do you know people who have like people that you otherwise like respect and like know to be like not. Yeah, my dad to make that up.

[01:36:11] My dad, who is an intelligent and man, I respect completely. He's very religious and he says that when he was a kid in Chile, they had like the equivalent of a wake would be with the body in the living room of the family.

[01:36:26] And I think like his uncle died or something. And that, you know, the body was just in the living room and he was upstairs sleeping or down. I remember another room and he swears that he heard like ghosts, you know, moaning like all night. He was a kid.

[01:36:43] You know, I think he heard like whatever the sort of trophy chains rattling kind of thing and he swears that was a supernatural experience. I had an uncle who I respect greatly, who is actually a extremely smart man who wrote many, many books, even translated the Bible

[01:37:00] on his own from Spain, from Hebrew and Greek into Spanish, had tales of like that he thought that he had encountered actual evil spirits. And I've always found it so hard, so difficult to reconcile the experiences that I've both read about from people who seem normal

[01:37:22] like and people I know, like I don't know what is going on. I don't know. That's all I want you to admit. No, but I think that was the precisely the thing that, you know, I never really looked into this and I had always been kind of just

[01:37:36] an instinctive naturalist, but I remember going out for drinks with like five fellow academics, you know, people who worked and like I was the only one there who hadn't had an experience of some kind. And I was like, holy shit.

[01:37:49] And then that made me just more interested in taking this kind of stuff seriously and whatever the truth is, like it does cry out for explanation that all of these people, very smart people, a lot of many of also who are aware

[01:38:07] of whatever debunking explanation people want to offer for this kind of stuff. And nevertheless, maintain that they had a kind of genuine supernatural experience. I wish I could. I'm like you. Like I want to be raped by a demon or something. Just to know.

[01:38:22] So yeah, I think that I have contented myself with the sort of psychological explanations in part, you know, the cognitive science, the kind of explanations that there are that we have an overactive sense of animacy and that there are sort of faulty

[01:38:41] perceptual mechanisms that can get explained if you believe they could get explained in one direction. And I've been OK with that, but that's not to say that it hasn't fucked with me in the same way that you're saying.

[01:38:52] In fact, I was listening to something the other day and someone just casually mentioned that there was a ghost in the house that they were in. Like as if it were nothing. And I'm like, that would walk my world. If I believe that, that's insane.

[01:39:06] Yeah, it reminds me, though. I may have told this story on the podcast before, but I love it. And I tell my class every time I talk about these cognitive mechanisms. It was a friend of mine in college had a philosophy professor who was an

[01:39:21] atheist and my friend was less more like you. He was like, yeah, who knows, right? And so he asked the professor, have you ever like had a moment where you you think like maybe there is something supernatural, maybe God does exist?

[01:39:34] And the guy says, well, you know, one time I was walking. Like I used to go for these walks in the forest late at night. And one time I thought to myself, well, let me give this a shot.

[01:39:43] Right. So I said, God, if you exist, show me a shooting star right now. So then I looked up and there was a shooting star ran across the sky. And he says, I looked down and I said, what a fucking coincidence.

[01:39:59] When I first heard this story, I was a theist. So I was like, wow, man, that guy is just not, you know, he's not accepting the truth of the matter. And then later on in life, I'm like, that happened.

[01:40:09] That has to happen at least a few times every year to somebody. Because shooting stars happen and people say God show me a sign. It's like just going to happen to somebody. But did he say show me a sign or show me a shooting star?

[01:40:24] Yeah. I mean, I don't think that happens that often. Well. Yeah, but it must happen. Right. It's true that like if you're out camping, you see a lot of shooting stuff. I don't know where he was. He was an old man.

[01:40:39] So it's probably like existed in the time when you could still see lots of stars. Yeah. And you know, this Tim Ingold paper is also about like different groups of people who have a kind of animistic ontology. But his his agenda here, unlike this other paper is to

[01:40:59] the Western tradition of thought to recover the sense of astonishment banished from official science and reminded me of this book that I came across recently that talk it's it's a it's a kind of sociology history of science.

[01:41:16] But the main thesis is that people that science has to do this. They have to just shut the door on supernatural explanation. They have to shut the door on anything that's not empirically testable or or there is empirical evidence for not because necessarily that's the most

[01:41:35] rational thing to do in every case, but because science needs that like the scientists and the method itself can't allow for believing those kinds of things. And one of the things that he says this explains is

[01:41:51] the kind of things that Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins will say when they just shit on philosophy or shit on like all these all these other forms of understanding or appreciating the world, he's like this is just part

[01:42:08] of like the bedrock of science and he almost even though I think he's very sympathetic to science and he thinks that's not a bad thing that they do that. But there's a kind of postmodern take in the sense that it's saying that it's

[01:42:21] the very structure of what it means to be a scientist that you have to have this attitude and it has to be dogma. I think he even uses the word dogmatic because that's the way that's that's the only way for science to function is to have that attitude.

[01:42:37] I don't know if I'm doing it justice, but I think that that's consonant with what this ingold guy wants to reverse. He wants you not to have it. I think that there are a few things that are going on that I agree with

[01:42:53] there in the in that set of things that you just said. And one of them is that for some reason, what it means to be scientific is often associated with this rejection of like the kinds of real human experiences like and and like oneness with nature

[01:43:16] or something like it's gotten wrapped up, whether it's because of a certain kind of cult of personality about certain kinds of people like those uber rationalists like Dawkins. When I think that so much of what scientists

[01:43:31] like what drives them is this sense of awe and wonder at like the unknowns in the universe. And and you know, when I read even those articles that that you put in our slack about quantum phenomenon being like so fucking weird, right?

[01:43:45] There are scientists who I think have like a deep appreciation of these mysteries in in the universe that we're trying to crack that. I sort of I wish that science weren't wrapped up into the fuddy duddiness

[01:43:57] of like, you know, Richard Hawkins telling you you're wrong about spirits or something. But at the same time, I'm like, I hate the implication that there is some sort of dogmatism that's causing me to not want to open my mind when in fact

[01:44:14] I feel like it's been such a different trajectory for me where I have come to understand that some things shouldn't be believed. And that's it. Like whereas before I lived in a world where all kinds of crazy things could be

[01:44:29] believed and I feel like it, it's I don't know. No, I get it. Like the dogmatism charge would be frustrating for somebody in your right circumstance because you were you emerged from a dogmatic. Yeah. Yeah. And so so yeah, I totally get that.

[01:44:50] And I think when he says dogmatism, he doesn't even mean it as I'm trying to find what this book is. He doesn't even mean it as like an insult or as some sort of epistemological objection as much as it that's just has to be built into the method.

[01:45:06] The scientific attitude as a scientist, not necessarily you as a overall person. Yeah. You as a scientist for science to function. That has to be like the official attitude. I think that that I remember now is going to say this other thing,

[01:45:22] which is what I kind of agree with the spirit, which is that for some reason, the prototypical science that has come to sort of dominate what it means to be science is like some version of physics that's not even true.

[01:45:36] Where like like actual physicists wouldn't even endorse this kind of like super medic mechanistic reductionist kind of thing. And I was I was talking to Shawn Nichols not too long ago about reductionism and about how it seems seems sort of silly to think that like, I know,

[01:45:53] suppose that I wanted to make a sociological claim that religions in the US thrive because of there was a free market for religion where in in in places where there is a state religion, you just have less engagement with religion

[01:46:09] because there was no competition for your soul, so to speak. And that's something people point out. Suppose that I want to make that claim. It seems really weird to think that the only way that I could explain that would

[01:46:20] be by studying brain cells or by studying how atoms interact with each other. Like it's it seems like a real misguided approach to think that everything could be like physics where where we reduce things and because, yeah,

[01:46:37] like that culturally that came to be what we mean by science. And I think even as like a behavioral scientist, like I think it's led us astray. We feel almost guilty for positing something that couldn't be explainable by reduced by the reductive mechanisms.

[01:46:53] Now would be another I mean, that would be a tough one for us to do. But I would like to do an episode on reductionism. You're right that it is the default kind of view. And it's almost like if you don't think it works in the reductionist way,

[01:47:07] like the burden is on you. Even if they have not successfully in any way reduced the phenomenon in question, it's like but it can be is the default position. Yeah, I don't know how many psychologists have kind of smirked at me for even

[01:47:21] daring to think that like the brain studies won't give us like necessary information, you know? Yeah, and there I agree with the sort of cultural criticism because science is a culture too. Like there like I like to separate the empirical process from the culture,

[01:47:38] but it can't be denied that there is a culture of science that is super reductionistic and and sometimes is I think you're trying to point out not good for the human spirit. Yeah, it's not good for the human spirit.

[01:47:52] It also doesn't certainly follow from any like it's really just an epistemological commitment, almost a dogmatic commitment in some forms. And in the like the bad sense of dogmatic. So this book just that I've mentioned, it's called The Knowledge Machine,

[01:48:07] How Irrationality Created Modern Science, which sounds, I think, so more kind of provocative. It is the publisher title. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, that's the title of the book for anyone who wants to go and say, well, actually, that's not what he's arguing. All right.

[01:48:29] So we got we both we both bent a little bit. Yeah, and I'm actually I was a little worried that that and I don't mean this as an insult, but that because you want you wanted the spirits and rocket rocks have like the forest spirits that you would

[01:48:47] that you would be less critical of the bad arguments, but you weren't. I don't think this was a good argument. A good set of arguments. I was pretty disappointed because I was looking forward to yeah, finding something that I don't know.

[01:49:01] Like maybe one day I will try to write out my general epistemological commitments here and my reasons for having them. But they're not this. Definitely not this. One day you and I will write something together and our audience would be happy to read it, I'm sure.

[01:49:20] Yeah, get your preorder your copies. Preorder whatever it is that we're going to make it in. We're going to make it in. I'm going to do an NFT book. So you will have to pay like a thousand dollars to get the genuine article of words that we.

[01:49:36] What do you think? Like the odds are that we will at some point have an NFT of very bad weather, the only way we have like signed off at the very the only way that it would happen is if I die and you lie to everybody

[01:49:50] and say this is what David would have wanted. I think I would have to die too. Like and then our very bad wizards monkey would become someone's Twitter avatar that they made one hundred and twelve thousand dollars for.

[01:50:02] I know. And then just that immediately rises to like five hundred thousand dollars in two weeks. All right, next next time we'll talk about crypto current. Oh, join us next time on Very Bad.

[01:51:02] Just a very bad wizard.