Agency Hyper Detection
20100724.0922 #blog
“It is natural to [primitive man], something innate, as it were, to project his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event which he observes as the manifestation of beings who at bottom are like himself. It is his only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the contrary it is a remarkable coincidence if by thus indulging his natural disposition he succeeds in satisfying one of his greatest needs.”
Sigmund Freud wrote these words in his treatise on religion, “The Future of an Illusion”. While most of Freud’s theories on psychology have been pretty much thoroughly debunked, his ideas on where religion comes from (the mind), and how it developed in early man and early civilization, is what got me interested in understanding the genesis of religious thought in human beings.
I was in the bathroom when I read that passage, and its similarity to one branch of Pascal Boyer’s theory of religion—agency hyper detection—absolutely floored me. It made me think two things: the first, I’m not a very meticulous reader. I read “The Future of an Illusion” two years ago, yet somehow I completely overlooked this passage, and the second, Freud’s evidence to support the idea of humans looking for human agency in the non-human natural world was extremely shoddy, but the idea was nonetheless there. It would be another century before Pascal Boyer came along and reexamined Freud’s hypothesis with some much more solid evidence coming from twentieth and twenty-first century cognitive science.
The idea that human beings have a tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things has been around since well before the ancient Greeks, whose language we use to derive the concept of humanizing non-human objects. But the question lingered: Why do humans do this? Boyer claims that the cognitive mechanisms that create this behavior are an evolutionary trait humans acquired over time which boils right down to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”.
Human beings in the wild, untamed, natural world were no doubt prey to a lot of critters out there. (Remember in the film 2001 when one of the monkey-humans gets attacked and eaten by a big cat? Yeah, like that.) So, a cognitive mechanism which Boyer calls agency hyper detection emerged in early humans which gave us the power to imagine that the rustling of leaves in the bushes was not simply happenstance, but instead caused by another living, breathing, thinking critter. And as evolutionary theory goes, the humans who thrived are the ones who got the hell out of the big cat’s way after hearing the rustle of leaves in the bushes.
Agency hyper detection is the modern interpretation of Freud’s idea that primitive man projects his existence outward. It’s not because of some ludicrous idea infantile sexuality or Oedipal complex. No. It’s based on something way more solid than that: The idea that cognitive functions in the brain are a product of evolution, and have a direct influence on human social behavior.
Anyway, yeah. That’s what I was thinking about in the bathroom this morning.
