I call this the "Daemon-Haunted World" in reference to Carl Sagan's book "Demon-Haunted World", where he talks about the triumph of reason over the "spooks" and

I call this the "Daemon-Haunted World" in reference to Carl Sagan's book "Demon-Haunted World", where he talks about the triumph of reason over the "spooks" and demons of superstition. It seems highly ironic to me that we have not yet finished banishing our old demons before conjuring up new ones to confuse and confound ourselves. Wherever you have a departure of mental model from reality that misunderstanding can give rise to irrational behavior. In the simplest case we have the old lady who, on being told that electricity is like water, went around putting tape over her unused outlets so that the electricity wouldn't leak out... Pretty harmless. I was watching some normal (non-technical) folks trying to modify something in their office mgmt software a few months ago, and I was struck by the cargo cult nature of their understanding of the internal model of the software. They eventually figured out how to do it but it took ten minutes for something that would have taken ten seconds in an old paper-based system. The core of the problem was the mismatch between users' mental models and the actual (software) machine in front of them. When these inaccurate models take the form of imaginary entities we have digital ghosts or spooks, and already some have names: Alexa, Siri, Cortana, these are strange new gods with opaque and intricate priesthoods. Their cathedrals are datacenters. They have catechisms and rituals. "Did you try turning it off and on again?" Multiplication of unnecessary entities is to be avoided, yes? Ockham's razor... - - - - Second, without getting into a big long thing about it, forest spirits are the forest spirits of today. It's not hard to communicate with them if you have a good attitude and some basic respect. We are literally of the same family. One life, One Love. Science is starting to get into the act, backing up and filling out the requisite hard science to explain what's going on when, e.g. you talk to your ficus. "Wood-wide web" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network Levin's lab, ambient biological intelligence, "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." (Conant and Ashby, 1982) http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html Living systems are evolving self-regulators, they therefore must have self-models, our own is called "ego", etc. Because these models are "software" running on the biological wetware there's no a priori reason why we shouldn't be able to communicate. It's the same software running on the same hardware with the same communication protocols. Neuro-somatic circuit of the "8-Circuit" model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-circuit_model_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-circuit_model_of_conscio... As I say, people have been communicating with forest spirits and such for pretty much all of recorded history (and pre-history if you want to interpret cave paintings that way...) so from my POV science is just filling in the details of a phenomenon that is already commonplace. It also means that, at least to some degree, Sagan was wrong about the old spooks and demons.