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Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech

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https://aeon.co/ideas/ancient-animistic-...-with-tech

EXCERPT: . . . A Japanese study in 2008 showed that elderly residents of a senior care home were quickly drawn into substantial social interactions with a rudimentary, toy-like robot seal named ‘Paro’. [...] And in a test in 2018 ... researchers built robots that administered ‘soft-warm hugs’ to people, who reported feeling trust and affection for the robot – even saying that they felt ‘understood by’ the robot.

[...] humans are suckers for any vague sign of social connection. All of us are a hair’s breadth away from Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away (2000), who forges a deep bond with a volleyball he names Wilson. Recently, science has come to understand the emotions of social bonding, and I think it helps us understand why it’s so easy to fall into these ‘as-if intimacies’ with things. [...] Our emotions are not very discriminating and we imprint easily on anything that reduces the feeling of loneliness. But I think there’s a second important ingredient to understanding our relationship with tech.

The proliferation of devices is certainly amplifying our tendency for anthropomorphism, and many influential thinkers claim that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon, that we’re entering into a dehumanising ‘artificial intimacy’ with gadgets, algorithms and interfaces. I respectfully disagree. What’s happening now is not new, and it’s more interesting than garden-variety alienation. We are returning to the oldest form of human cognition – the most ancient pre-scientific way of seeing the world: animism.

Animistic beliefs dominate the everyday lives of people in Southeast and East Asia, as I discovered while living there for several years. Local spirits, called neak ta in Cambodia, inhabit almost every farm, home, river, road and large tree. [...] Like my relationship with Alexa, animists have the same as-if perspective toward their spirits.

Animism is strong in Asia and Africa, but really it is everywhere around the globe, just below the surface of more conventional official religions. In actual numbers and geographic spread, belief in nature spirits trounces monotheism, because even the one-godders are closet animists. Spend some time in New Orleans, with its voodoo and hoodoo cultures, and you’ll see that animism is alive and interwoven with mainstream religions such as Catholicism.

[...] Animism is not so much a set of beliefs as a form of cognition. I think we are all natural-born animists, and those of us in Western developed countries slowly learn to discount this mode of cognition in favour of a mechanical view of the world. Indigenous approaches to nature are dubbed uneducated or juvenile because they use agency and purpose to think about nature ... However, some philosophers and psychologists are striking back, pointing out that animistic thinking reveals many of the subtle ecological relations in nature that mechanical approaches miss.

If animist thinking is childish and uneducated, then why are indigenous peoples so much better at surviving and thriving in local natural ecologies? Some kinds of animism are adaptive and aid our survival, because they focus our attention on ecological connections, but they also train our social intelligence to predict and respond to other agents. If your world is thick with other agents – all vying for their desires and goals – then you spend a lot of time organising, revising and strategising your own goals in a social space of many competing aims.

So our new ‘tech-animism’ might not be detrimental at all. [...] Our new animism ... might be quite helpful in keeping the social emotions and skills healthy enough for real human bonding, perspective-taking and empathy. Instead of dehumanising us, this tech-animism could actually be keeping us human... (MORE - details)
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