4 ms·

The world is alive. Would you sing a song to the Moon? Read books to animals or stuffed toys? Show your tablet to an airplane so that you can watch cartoons tog

The world is alive. Would you sing a song to the Moon? Read books to animals or stuffed toys? Show your tablet to an airplane so that you can watch cartoons together? My daughter does. To her there’s no difference between our rescue dog and her stuffed teddy bear. Both are alive in their own ways, both can be admired and engaged with, both of them deserve her love and attention. For a long time, I’ve had this nagging feeling that we’ve lost something really important by switching from an animist-based metaphysical view of the world (which seems to have been widespread in tribal societies) to a scientific-rationalist “individual in world” (broadly, theistic) model. In religious studies, this is called “disenchantment” and examples like the author’s suggest that this is a learned cultural phenomenon and not something inherent to how humans see the world. The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me.

mvaliente2001 4y ago
I think we never get over animism completely, like this old Ikea Lamp ad shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg
carapace 4y ago
> The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me. I call it "the Daemon-Haunted World" after Sagan's book: > "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" is a 1995 book by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and co-authored by Ann Druyan,[1] in which the authors aim to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. They explain methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world Just as we are about to defeat superstition once and for all, we populate the world with new "spirits" called "Siri", "Alexa", and "Cortana".

mvaliente2001 4y ago

I think we never get over animism completely, like this old Ikea Lamp ad shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

carapace 4y ago

> The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me. I call it "the Daemon-Haunted World" after Sagan's book: > "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" is a 1995 book by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and co-authored by Ann Druyan,[1] in which the authors aim to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. They explain methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world Just as we are about to defeat superstition once and for all, we populate the world with new "spirits" called "Siri", "Alexa", and "Cortana".